Fight Club

Rating:
Summary: Wrong edition
Review: Yeah, yeah, the book is great, but this hardcover edition sucks... if I'm spendind 13 extra bucks on a hardcover edition
I'd expect it was good quality paper and finish. This cardboard paper I got had still pages together I had to separate with a knife... Believe me, buy another edition and save 10+ dollars

Rating:
Summary: Fight Club!!!
Review: It turns out that one of the most bizarre movies I have ever seen is also one of the most deliciously bizarre books I have ever read. Many times I found myself saying "What the..." aloud as the plot grew more and more bizarre. At the end of the book, I immediately turned back to page one and began reading again. If you're looking for something good and different to read - this is definitely it.

Rating:
Summary: Soap suds and more
Review: Fight Club was the first Chuck Palahniuk novel I read, and I have since become a die-hard fan of his works. I first saw the movie with my friend and fell in love with the story. She was the one who first recommended reading the novel, because according to her, the movie leaves out too many things, and you need to read the book to get the full impact of the story. She couldn't have been more right. I purchased the book and read non-stop for two days, then watched the movie again. It's truly captivating. The best thing, however, is not the story itself but the way in which Palahniuk presents the story. His writing style is one that is brilliant and unique. The characters he creates are intense, and you manage to find parts of yourself that relate the each of them, parts of yourself and your mind that you didn't even know existed. This book is amazing, as are all of Chuck Palahniuk's novels. Would also recommend the following books: Children's Corner by McCrae, Survivor, Plot Against America, and Bark of the Dogwood.

Rating:
Summary: This Novel Deserves Acclaim
Review: Chuck Palahniuk's debut novel, Fight Club, has acquired a following, and rightfully so, become a cult classic. It's filled to the brim with brilliant wordplay, insightful narration, and satirical anti-mainstream consumerism concepts. The style of the novel is splendidly unconventional. Everything from haikus and homemade explosive recipes to anatomy perspectives are present in this no holds barred literary work of art. I'm a very happy camper if Chuck really is the future of in your face Gen-X fiction.

Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler's pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die. For a long time though, Tyler and I were best friends.

So begins our tale set atop the Parker-Morris Building with ten minutes before it's blown to hell. Palahniuk's trademark is opening all of his stories (Fight Club, Survivor, Invisible Monsters) near the end, where the carnage has already really gotten out of hand, where people are about to die. Our Narrator is screwed, and with three minutes remaining before he might die, he tells us how he got in this mess in the first place, he tells us "I remember everything."

Welcome to the world of our hero. He's an insomniac working for a corrupt car company, traveling to wherever his boss doesn't want to go for meetings.

Our paladin is a corporate lap dog, jaded, disillusioned with his life. He's depressed, suicidal, an IKEA addict. On flights, he contemplates his own death by plane crash. Everything has become a routine to him.

I set my watch two hours earlier or three hours later, Pacific, Mountain, Central, or Eastern time; lose an hour gain an hour.

This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.

Our Narrator is in dire need of a way to change his life, something to make him feel alive again, and sadly, Angela Hayes is already taken.

So to cure his insomnia, our main man goes to different types of cancer, disease, and terminal illness support groups. And although he's in perfect health, he's been going to these meetings for two years and hasn't been caught doing so because "Anyone who might've noticed me in two years has either died or recovered and never came back." He tells us "...why I love support groups so much, if people thought you were dying, they gave you their full attention." It is at these meetings that our Narrator meets Marla Singer, another Faker, the Narrator's antagonist/love interest. The support group meetings though, they're nothing more than a quick fix.

Enter Tyler Durden. A night job worker who our protagonist meets on a nude beach: part-time movie projectionist, part-time banquet waiter. After our Narrator's home and all his possessions within are destroyed by a bomb, a phone call is made. A changing of the guard occurs.

The phone rang in Tyler's rented house on Paper Street.
Oh, Tyler, please deliver me.
And the phone rang...
Oh, Tyler, please rescue me.
And the phone rang...
Deliver me from Swedish furniture.
Deliver me from clever art.
And the phone rang and Tyler answered...
May I never be complete.
May I never be content.
May I never be perfect.
Deliver me, Tyler, from being perfect and complete.
Tyler and I agree to meet at a bar.

That night, Fight Club is created. It's an escape for those with boring, everyday jobs, a place where yuppies can take their aggressions out on each other by beating the living hell out of each other. It's a boys-only club with eight sacrosanct rules. Soon however, Tyler takes Fight Club up a notch with Project Mayhem, a fascist group rebels against society by way of antics that get more and more extreme, right up until the novel's anti-climactic conclusion. The novel's brooding Catcher in the Rye-type ending is much more thought provoking than the film's impressively cinematic pyrotechnics blowout.

Trust me when I tell you to read this enthralling masterwork. Chuck Palahniuk makes the apocalypse of Western Civilization sound so damn cool even I'm anticipating it. Make sure to pick up a copy of this great book. Another underground, lesser-known classic I want to recommend is The Losers Club by Richard Perez.


Rating:
Summary: A truly inventive novel and a good read
Review: How many times do you read a novel and just know what it coming next? Too many stories seem to be re-worked versions of things we've read before; after all, how many truly new things are there under the sun? Palahniuk, however, has created something new and it is both interesting and fun to read.

"Fight Club" follows a disengaged young professional whose life is sliding meaninglessly by until he meets a man about his age who is his polar opposite, capturing each moment of life. The two strike up a friendship and a club that pits other disengaged young men in fights against one another. They strike a chord and events spiral. To an unpredictable conclusion.

Read this one.

Rating:
Summary: Tooth and nail
Review: I like anything off the beaten path (think McCrae's THE CHILDREN'S CORNER or possibly Boyle's WATER MUSIC). So it was only natural that I'd be attracted to FIGHT CLUB. What I really like about this book is how easy to read it is. The story moves along more quickly than all of Palahniuk's other novels, which I suppose helped in its translation to the screen. There is less build up and a simple plot. This is one of those books that every once in a while I pick back up and read again, just because it is fun and easy. The major messages about society and work and modern life are slap-you-in-the-face obvious, but that fact doesn't take away from their validity or from the more subtle points about friendship and relationships.