Rating: 
Summary: The Most Profound Book of the 1990's
Review: "If you don't know what you want, you end up with a lot you don't." From the very beginning, Fight Club grabs hold of you and pulls you into its world and won't let go until you finish the book. Palahniuk's unorthodox and no holds barred writing style make Fight Club a gem that will leave an indelible impression on you, whether you like it or not. Fight Club makes you put on your thinking cap and won't let you take it off. Palahniuk's black humor is razor sharp as it cuts deeply into our materialistic values and societal norms that we hold dear. His message - we think we own our posessions, job, and lifestyle, but in reality, they own us. Anyone who needs a wake up call that will make you rethink your life's priorities, order Fight Club. I give it my full 5 stars and recommend it to everyone - it is undoubtedly the most original and provocative book of the 90's.
Rating: 
Summary: Can't understand all the hubbub about this book
Review: The book is fairly middling - and I'm being charitable. Not a must read, by any means, though perhaps appropriate for killing time on a plane trip. Literarywise it's nothing special, quite on a par with anything you can find in an aspiring-fiction-writer anthology, where a number of 15-page student-written short stories are being dissected and analysed by some professional writing teacher for other aspiring writers' edification... the only more or less alive character is the teller of the story, the rest are cardboard figures, including the main female character... and as far as ideas and spirit of this book, those besides being silly, tired, and hard to relate to, are pretty bland and far-fetched as well. Here's the gist of it: The guy doesn't like his life (how fashionable!) and goes multiple personality and starts another protest movement with a mass of recruited disaffected impressively dressed in black against The Evil Society and Wicked Capitalistic Bosses in suits, yawn, yeah, ok, very romantic. Good thing the protagonist only castrates some of them Evil Bosses, that is he doesn't fly any planes into landmark buildings, though of course maybe that is saved up for the next installment, who knows. Hollywood made a motion picture out of this... go figure. Is there anything good about this story? Well, it's easy to read - you can make it in just a few hours - and it sort of holds your attention, that I guess, is something positive. Fonts are big and easy on the eye. I can't see why this mediocre work is so popular with so many people... over 300 reviews here, most very positive! Otoh, someone (Nietzsche or Shopenhauer or Ortega y Gasset, all of whom are certainly better writers and thinkers than Mr Palahniuk) said, if the masses like it, it can't be good, so there you have it, another confirmation of this sober thought. OK, to summarize it all, this is a rather average and rather silly low-brow-romanticism book you can easily live without. Don't believe the hype about it.
Rating:
Summary: I Am Jack's Jaw Hitting the Floor
Review: So, _Fight Club_ the movie comes out. I think, "Ooh, that looks cool! It has fighting and stuff!" Then I read Michael Wilmington's review, and see that there is much, much more to the movie than just fighting. I think, "I should read the book first." Long story short, Chuck Palahniuk is a god among men. _Fight Club_ the novel is not only a brilliantly crafted narrative (which is, believe it or not, an understatement), it's a bone-shattering foray into the unloved counterculture of alienated male Gen-Xers. They hold jobs requiring minimal skill. They buy things the media makes them think they need. Their lives are slipping further and further away every day. And they're pissed. Palahniuk, a la John Steinbeck with _ The Grapes of Wrath_, has found this overlooked segment of society, and written a masterful account if it. The problem I have with writing glowing reviews is that I fear I'm building the book/movie/album up too much and only setting the potential buyer up for disappointment. So, as always, go into this book as you would any other book. Just remember that my 51-year-old father liked _Fight Club_ almost as much as I did.
Rating:
Summary: Salvation through self-destruction
Review: I think some of the critics of this book are missing Palahniuk's point. Fight Club does not glorify anarchy or encourage mass destruction. Palahniuk does his best to shock and stimulate the reader, not to encourage violence, but to open his or her eyes and stop living complacent, misguided lives. He likes the seemingly paradoxical idea of achieving self-awareness through self-destruction. Only by hitting rock bottom can one rise to the top. Fight Club is of course the extreme example of this case, and Palahniuk's warning about extending self-destruction to destruction of others and full-blown anarchy is loud and clear. Palahniuk's goal is to force you to open your eyes and ask yourself: what are you living for? What are your goals in life? If you had only one more day to live, what would you do? And why aren't you doing those things right now? Self-realization is not anarchy. Neither is seeing things for what they are, not what popular culture tells you to believe. Palahniuk's philosophy, evident in his other writings as well, is laid out toward the end of Fight Club: "We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are." On top of that, we "just are" for a short period of time. Palahniuk's point: Don't waste that time by living a "safe" life, or a life dictated by others. Love life, and live life.
Rating:
Summary: Somthing Else, Somthing More
Review: This book is shocking and provocative, but also has enough meaning behind it to be considered great. This book faces issue that most books don't. It also pushes boundaries that might throw mild readers off and disconcert them enough to not read the book. But if you can handle radical ideas and life altering reading then this book is a must have. It follows a man through a very odd time in his life and his friend Tyler Durden, the man who changes his life for better or worse, Tyler changes everything he knows about the world and gives him a new way to look at it.
Rating:
Summary: A master piece
Review: Fight Club is one of my all time favorite movies, so I decided it would only be right for me to read the book. I was DEFINETLY not disappointed. The style in which this book is written is absolutly brilliant. It holds your attention and makes you wonder what's going to happen next (even if you have seen the movie). I'll never regret the day I picked up this book. I was blown away by everything about this book. I make everyone I know read this book...and I would recommend it to anyone.
Rating: 
Summary: Very good book
Review: This was a great book to read. After seeing the movie and enjoying it, I wanted to read the book since books are usually better than the movie. This theory was upheld, as the book was not a disappointment. I look forward to reading Palahniuk's other books.
Rating:
Summary: "I Want You To Hit Me As Hard As You Can"
Review: I'll keep this short. If you love the film, you will love the book.
Rating: 
Summary: Huh huh, Beavis, fascism is cool. Yeah Butt Head, huh huh.
Review: Chances are you already know the story. Ole Jack is down in the dumps because his job and life suck and he has to go to support groups for catharsis. Then he meets a fine fellow named Tyler Durden, and they become best friends by beating each other up. Then they start a fight club so other men can come and be cool just like them. If that was the extent of it, I may have actually sort of liked the book. It's kind of a clever idea. Unfortunately, that is where Palahniuk's witticism, humour, cleverness and originality end. For good. There have been genuinely insightful books that study the human inclination to violence. Octave Mirbeau's The Torture Garden is such a book. Fight Club is not such a book. We have a few singularly distasteful scenes involving the manufacture of soap, the cinema, and the fighting in the fight club itself. These may seem gratuitous, but they actually served an important purpose - the purpose of establishing, once and for all, how vile the characters of this book truly are. Not that that is advertant - Palahniuk seems to think you should like them. His Tyler is generally presented as being likeable. After all, he revolted against his role, became "nonconformist," and started ranting about materialism and philosophy. He also likes to talk about freeing oneself from society (by fighting in fight clubs). He does that last bit a lot, because Palahniuk thinks it is deep. By the time he starts attracting legions of followers who beat each other up for him, the message is clear - we are supposed to think very highly of him, because he isn't the way society wants him to be and is "unique." Even when he has these followers go kill people and commit sundry acts of terrorism. Inexplicably, the irony is lost on most people. Do fans of this book realize that Tyler's "philosophy" does not free anyone, or make anyone stronger, in the entire book? It turns men into blackshirts and stormtroopers - faceless cultists who are even denied names. It destroys their dignity more than society ever did. But Palahniuk has an intellectual rationalization to explain this away! According to him, this is _the way all men are_ deep down inside, and thus, Tyler is really cool and admirable! Well...gosh. Hey, Chuck, if it's good for men to be faceless drones with no will of their own, why rebel in the first place against this horribly oppressive society of yours? Now, you could say that the book doesn't advocate Tyler's manipulative, narcissistic, destructive worldview. I deny this claim. There is no one in the book who doesn't relish it, even though Jack does stop its spread in the end (in the truly awful ending - more on that in a bit). There is nothing in the book to counteract it. There are no opposing ideas presented. You can come up with a complex thought process that concludes that this is really only an argument _against_ violence, but this conclusion will be based upon nothing that is in, you know, the actual _book_. Because let's make no bones about it - we are meant to like Tyler. I've seen keychains that quote him. All the fans of this book quote Tyler. He's meant to be quoted. He's presented as witty and charming and intelligent and strong and unique, and his megalomaniacal escapades are as well. We are meant to admire him. We even have a particularly contrived and false scene in which Jack forces a man - at gunpoint - to "go and follow his dreams," to reinforce the message - that Tyler is good, society is bad. And the particularly ludicrous ending does nothing to dispel this. You see, thinking that it wasn't enough to write such a fine book already, Palahniuk decided to jump on the "hey, that reality was merely an illusion! THIS is the real reality! it's different!" bandwagon. The result is as gimmicky as you'd think, and more importantly - it serves to "reinforce" this poisonous hogwash about how all males are really just like Tyler (a conclusion based on the author's thorough study of psychology, no doubt). Everything in this book comes back to the coolness of Tyler - a bully who read the Cliff Notes to Nietzsche and uses them to manipulate people who want someone to tell them that their utter failure in life is not their fault so badly that they're willing to die for it. For that's what Tyler is - Palahniuk's poetization of the talentless, worthless, yet very malicious failure. Read the scene in the cinema and you should see just how shallow and worthless Tyler's "rebellion" really is. (Ah, picking on families with children because they represent your hated society, Tyler, what a brave rebel you are.) Again, I must reiterate that this, according to Palahniuk, is something we're supposed to admire. I've seen a lot of intelligent, thoughtful and kind human beings talk about this book as if it were some kind of stunning intellectual achievement. This baffles me beyond belief. I would have thought that women would be the first to see through the wall of testosterone that clouds the mediocre vileness of this book, but apparently the opposite is the case. Have our standards gone so low that anyone can come along, bang out an utter hack that says "society is bad!" in the crassest way possible, and be recognized as some kind of profound thinker?
Rating: 
Summary: Good book, great movie...
Review: On rare occasions, there are movies that are better than the book they are based on. Fight Club happens to be just one of those. Admittedly, I didn't read the book until I'd seen the film several times. I'm not sure that I'd feel otherwise had I first read the book. The film hits everything right, where the book misses in several places. While the story is great, the film does a better job of telling it. I agree with the other review here that says to see the film before reading the book.
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