Rating: 
Summary: Buy "Choke" not this
Review: Unlike JR Pinto's review I will warn of any spoilers! I am a big Palahniuk fan. This book was bad. Not bad good, bad bad. "Choke" was much better, For serious!
Rating: 
Summary: Entertaining, but nothing new
Review: Like all of Palahniuk's novels, Diary was a quick, entertaining read with its twisted plot and demented characters. However, that seems to be part of the problem. While the plot and characters were different from those showcased in previous novels, the author's writing style has not seemed to evolve. He even seems to use almost the same sentences...only minimally altered...(what they don't teach you in art school-Diary; what they don't teach you journalism school-Lullaby) Nevertheless, considering Palahniuk's cynicism, I wouldn't doubt that he is aware of this. Perhaps this is what pop-culture Americans deserve...
Rating:
Summary: Palahniuk is a great writer,....
Review: but as with Lullaby, he seems to be exploring in a realm of uncomfortable subject matter. While it is interesting and vivid, I would say that Choke and Survivor are his greater works.
Rating: 
Summary: Surprisingly Pointless
Review: Chuck can usually make even the most derivative plot cliches seem fresh (a poem that kills people when you read it out loud, anyone?), and his sharp, acerbic writing style more than masks his thin plotting, but Diary is uninspired and pointless. Gone is his astute social commentary, gone is the wit and humor, gone are the twisty plot developments. All we have left here are a few undeveloped ideas and a story that goes nowhere interesting. It reads like Stephen King during his alcoholic phase and doesn't even bother to build to a climax. If you want a recommendation, read Lullaby instead, which at least went for broke in its bleak nihilism and had more than a few moments of inspired brilliance.
Rating:
Summary: Think Again
Review: Loved Fight Club, had high hopes for this one. Started out great, and spiraled downward to the point where I wasn't just disappointed, I was annoyed. A hack, pat ending and a phoning-it-in plot makes for a truly lackluster addition to the Pahlahniuk bibliography.
Rating: 
Summary: Incredible, I hope for more like this.
Review: Diary shows Chucks minimalist social commentary at its best. Diary takes the place of a "Coma Diary" by Misty Tracy Wilmot, Her husband is found in her garage inside the car after an failed attempt at suicide. Misty used to be a painter, all her life shes been told how amazing she was at painting but she has, unfortunately, lost her inspiration. After her husband dies, she starts getting calls from people whose houses Peter Wilmot had built, they call to say that they are missing a specific room of their house. The Small fish shaped island in which all of this takes place is now infested with tourists and the natives will do anything to get them away. How does all of this tie in? In the darkest way Chuck Palahniuk can imagine with his own twist of humor this book wraps up very nicely with an amazing anti-climactic climax."Just for the record, Diary is as hypnotic as a poised cobra. Chuck Palahniuk demonstrates that the most chilling special effects come not from Industrial Light and Magic but from the words of a gifted writer."
- Ira Levin, author of Rosemary's Baby
Rating:
Summary: Could be the worst book I've ever read.
Review: I've been a big fan of Chuck Palahniuk's work, but this book did much to diminish that respect. At 260 pages, this is a short book to begin with. When you account for the chapter breaks every three or four pages, all the one-sentence paragraphs, all the sentences and phrases that are repeated over and over throughout the book, I would bet there is little more than 100 pages of real writing in this "story." That's not absolutely a bad thing, less is more in my book, but nothing is still nothing, no matter if it's stretched across 50 pages or 500. Though a hardcover, it is not much bigger than a paperback in size. If it were printed on the same paper size as most real novels, using a similar typeface and elminiting all the repetition, this book might only amount to about 50 pages. If IKEA published books, they would be like "Diary;" sleek, cute, apartment sized and with a core made of recycled sawdust. The big disappointment is that this book is not funny. It is completey lacking the wonderful wit that spices most of Chuck's work. The characters are universally unlikable, especially the main character, a fat, self-pitying drunk who is called by different variations of her full name which is poor little Misty Marie Kleinman Wilmot. So you get poor little Misty, Misty Marie Wilmot, Misty Kleinmen, poor little Misty Kleinman, etc. There is little more depth to her character than her names and the ongoing litany of how she has suffered at the hands of her husband, her in-laws and life in general. The book flips back and forth between second and third person which is confusing and annoying, but perhaps understandable given that Misty does not seem to have a self. That might explain why she can be talking "to" somebody at the same time that she's talking "about" them. Palahniuk tries to weave some Plato, Carl Young and art trivia into the story but again, most of it seems like useless filler that just won't come together at the end, no matter how hard the author tries to pretend that it does. It took me about two months to get through this book, even given its short length. It never grabbed me, and was hard work all the way. I began dreading picking it up. It was painful. I kept expecting it to kick in and excite me like so much of Chuck's other work. It never did. It was almost as if somebody other than Palahniuk wrote it. It's by far the worst thing I've read by Chuck and maybe the worst I've ever read.
Rating: 
Summary: Nifty
Review: I am a huge fan of Mr. Palanhiuck's writing. But why not five star? It is because compared to the other three books I have read (Lullaby, Invisible Monsters, and Choke), this one was not as good. It does have a psycho plot. You have to keep reading this book because the plot and what is happening is at the tip of your toungue but you just can't grasp it until you finish the book. I read it in one sitting. And now I am off to read "Fugitives and Refugees". Read this book. It is nifty...infact read them all.
Rating:
Summary: I wish I had the option of giving this book ZERO stars
Review: This is by far the WORST book I've read in a long, long, long time. I honestly am not trying to be a naysayer. I am not trolling or writing a bad review of Palahniuk's "Diary" because I enjoy spreading misery and negativity. I don't. I came into this novel with little to no expectations. I enjoyed the movie adaptation of "Fight Club," and so figured that I would give Palahniuk a shot when I saw "Diary" at my local library. Don't get me wrong, the novel started out interestingly enough, but the thing began to unravel around the halfway point, strained by too much hapless coincidence, too many deus ex machinas, and, let's face it, the lack of a truly compelling story. Thereon it gets worse. Characters that had some tiny bit of dimensionality quickly became static, 2 dimensional horror / mystery novel cliches. The entire last half of the novel simply reeked of "Rosemary's Baby," but far, far less interesting and esoteric.
I honestly can't believe a publisher touched this manuscript, let alone published it. Mr. Palahniuk should be be fined exorbitantly for doing such a disservice to not only the horror / mystery genre, but to the art of novels as a whole! It certainly seems that he has succumbed to the dreaded disease of Stephen-King-itis, the major symptom being the belief that because of one's mainstream celebrity, one can write the most pure and undiluted slop and expect the reading public to eat it up unquestioningly.
Unfortunately, based on some of the reviews I've read concerning this book on amazon.com, it seems that the reading public DOES eat up this slop, and praise it as genius on top of that!, which cyclically feeds the fire and results in the production of even more slop.
End this vicious cycle! Steer clear from this book!
Rating:
Summary: creepy...but enjoyable.
Review: Usually, I stay away from books that give me the heebie-jeebies...but when I picked this one up, I couldn't stop. Palahnuik does a wonderful job of keeping the plot hidden from the reader until the exact moment that it will scare us the most. The plot is unique, for sure, and the style in the form of a woman's diary is very intimate. It's a really, really quick read; I reccommend it for a little scary weekend escape.
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