The End of the Road

In this postmodern lark, a depressed nihilist becomes friends with a hyper-agentic rationalist; hilarity does not ensue.

John Barth was once a household name. As I understand it, you couldn't walk around a college campus in the early 1960s without running into someone reading his most notable work, The Sot-Weed Factor.

This is my sixth-favorite book specifically because, in the book's opening pages, our protagonist is paralyzed by indecision, and is told by his unconventional doctor to do the following: When indecisive, pick the thing that comes first alphabetically. If that test is inapplicable, pick the first thing on the list, or the thing on the left. This is a technique I still use multiple times a week to quickly resolve unimportant decisions (and why I own so many aardvarks and abacuses).