"This is like saying: 'Is Ronaldo better than Stanley Matthews?'" said poet and former Booker judge Simon Armitage of this year's Best of the Booker competition. "It's not possible to judge."
Most of us would agree. The competition, which aims to single out the best ever Booker winner, will ask us to select a clear winner from 40 years of Commonwealth literature.
This means setting Thomas Keneally's Holocaust tale Schindler's Ark against DBC Pierre's comic and schatological Vernon God Little. The merits of books written in the shadow of the cold war will weighed alongside those written against a backdrop of globalisation and reality TV.
In May, three judges will produce their shortlist from which online voters will choose an outright winner. Armitage is right - it's not really a fair assessment of literary merit at all, it's a pub debate.
But what a pub debate. Though there are still arguments over some of the winners - and there are some inexplicable omissions over the years - as a collection of the best Commonwealth writing of the past four decades, the Booker Prize takes some beating.
It also represents one of the few occasions when the bedside reading of the literati and the general public converge.
So let's agree that the Best of the Bookers is a marketing exercise, a reading group argument, an unfair contest, and then get involved anyway. In 1993, on the 25th anniversary of the Booker Prize, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children was chosen as the Booker of Bookers.
15 years on, we want to hear what you would like to see win and why. To refresh your memories, Sam Jordison has been posting a regular blog, in which he discusses previous Booker winners.
