It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence.

– Mahatma Gandhi

I’ve been wanting to have a book fight club for a long time.

You know when you have time or money to buy “a” book and you browse Amazon or a bookstore and see “two” similar books, but can only read one?

No one is going to tell you which one is the good one… until now! Bam!

I’m going to compare similar books and dish out the truth about which one I think is better and why, so that you may be able to save time.

There are more books than we will ever be able to read. When I read all the children’s books at my small local library in Hawaii, then my mom took me to the next further library and I read those books, when I got to the next reading level we had moved to California with larger libraries and it hit me that it wouldn’t be a matter of time until I read all the books, it would be an unfinished task when I died…

Fast forward to now and there are more books, movies, shows, people than we will ever have time to engage with… exponentially. Many are free and many are affordable. It’s great, but also harrowing for me, someone who had hoped to read “all the books” before I die.

At some point you realize you have a limited time on Earth, and there are “too many” books to read them all, it was actually a horrifying and sad point for me, you probably are more mature than me… but it’s still hard for me to face the wall of emotional futility that I won’t get to do everything I want to do before I die.

I do kind of enjoy all books the way some people enjoy all cats or all beers. But knowing there is a limited time on Earth I wanted to do not just book reviews, but Book Fights for others who were on the fence about what to read in the moment. By all means you could read the looser first, or the winner and the looser simultaneously (some people do that… multiple books at a time, yeah I’ve done it, when I was younger), but the whole point is for me to discover what I found more helpful and therefore make the world very slightly better by saving a very small amount of people, who follow my writing or find it, want to read the books I feature, but can’t read both, and then read the better one (for them) based on my recommendation.

This Book Fight Club was something I wanted to do with some drawings, but perhaps that will wait and I’ll just go through the discovery and comparison process first.

For some reason I see this as taboo, but just a little, not like dog fighting, more like rooster fighting…

I was once worried I would offend the authors, but I really don’t think they will care and if they do, hopefully they will step up their book game for the rematch.

I was thinking I will score the matches in these catagories:

In a normal Book Fight:

1. Reader Enjoyment
2. Knowledge Delivery
3. Life Change Catalyst Rate

In a Championship Book Fight:

1. Reader Enjoyment
2. Knowledge Delivery
3. Life Change Catalyst Rate
4. Stylistic Writing Quality
5. Badassness

This won’t be a copy of what books teachers were forced to read and force you to read… this will be a no holds-bard free for all of free thought and wordcraft.

It will be biased and subjective, but I’ve noticed so are all other sports, boxing reserves the right for the judges to be right, their decision is defined as the correct decision, which makes it really tricky to follow and easy to fix the outcome via bribery. It’s right because “I said so” really? Actually yes, read the rules…

I’ve competed before in martial arts and refereed before in martial arts, so I’ve noticed from both sides that it’s impossible for the referee to be correct all the time, robberies happen and will continue to happen.

I plan to do this on Fridays… perhaps three match ups, a children’s book, a self help book and a fiction book? Ok, maybe four… got to show Non-Fiction some love too, “got to”.

Today I’ll be working on:

Fly Weight (Children’s): Richard Kipling’s Rickitiki Tavi VS Margret Rey and H. A. Rey’s Curious George

Bantam Weight (Fiction): Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth VS Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time

Welter Weight (Self Improvement): Ryan Holiday’s Ego is the Enemy VS Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fu*k

Heavy Weight (Non-Fiction): Paul G Hewitt’s Conceptual Physics VS Raymond Serway’s Physics for Scientist & Engineers with Modern Physics.

Hopefully I will finish this from 7-8 PM, but not sure how the day will play out because it’s family game night (Sneaky Snaky Squirrel a game that encourages your children to steal from you, but also teaches the cruelty of fate, all with cute plastic acorns!).

Stats:

George – Height: 142cm (4’8″) Weight: 54Kg (120 lbs) Age 2020-1941 = 79

Rikitikitavi – Height: 55cm (22″) Weight: 5Kg (11lbs) Age 2020-1894 = 126

Prefight:

Going to be an interesting match-up today, a large weight advantage to George, he’s been trained by the man with the Yellow Hat, he has a huge fan following, but that won’t help him in the ring today. One of his skills is curiousity, however, Rikitivitavi is also strong in that front. Rikitikitavi is the older fighter, but that’s not always a disadvantage, sometimes experience can be the turning point in a very evenly matched fight. If his eyes are red, that should mean he has his head in the game today.

Rikitikitavi is coming off a victory against the pair of cobras Nag and Nagaina, but don’t count George out before the fight starts. Hopefully he kept himself thin for this fight, a full mongoose is a slow mongoose and Rikitikitavi has struggled with conditioning in the past, he’s still training with Darzee the tailor bird.

It’s nice to see George out of jail, he’s such a nice monkey, but has had fights cancelled due to legal problems before, such a shame to see an athlete of that quality held back due to those issues. So many children look up to George, I really hope he stays out of prison moving forward.

This fight takes place in Dictionopolis, perhaps a slight advantage to Rikitikitavi.

This is a championship bought, it will be scored by:

1. Reader Enjoyment
2. Knowledge Delivery
3. Life Change Catalyst Rate
4. Stylistic Writing Quality
5. Badassness