Every Friday I'll be posting a teeny tiny book review, just to celebrate the upcoming weekend and to push myself to read more and to reflect on what I'm reading. I assume that I'm not alone in wondering what has happened to my reading habit? How is it that I'm a writer and yet I find it hard to fit my reading into my life? I believe it's the clutter that surrounds us, ranging from digital clutter of bits and bytes to actual clutter of stuff that once upon a time wouldn't have been so cheap and so fragile (hello, 10 cent plastic part from China, the part without which my washer/VCR/
I'm currently reading Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club for a summer seminar over at Story Grid. This is not a book I would ever have picked up on my own, which is a great reason to continue to take classes! No, I haven't seen the movie, although I did look at some clips and trailers before starting the book. Um, not the kind of movie I would have watched willingly, probably ever.
You may have heard of Palahniuk's troubles, either from the usual news sources or from my blog post earlier. He's been a victim of embezzlement at his literary agency, and has been financially strapped for some time, apparently. This is pretty shocking, given his commercial success.
Fight Club is not a book for the faint of heart or the easily offended. It's not even about the swearing or the sex, which isn't over-the-top by any means. It's “edgy” in the very literal sense of the word–it teeters along on the edge of uncomfortable, teasing the reader with constant references to bodily fluids and crimes you've never thought of (and that cause you to wonder if anyone REALLY does those things? I've had to steel myself away from Google, because what if the FBI is watching my Google searches…? How to make a bomb? How to build a silencer on a gun? Can you really blow up an apartment with a deliberate gas leak?).
Two things make this book worth reading. First, Palahniuk's voice. It's unique and gripping. This is hard to do without sounding affected, so I'm persuaded that this is really the way his brain sounds. If you read anything he's written online, it's eerily similar in tone.
Second, the book is a meditation on the state of things in the modern world. I've already written about clutter this week–it's on my mind. Cal Newport writes convincingly about the necessity for “deep work” but I'm not even to the point where he's at (I hope to get there!). I'm just talking about buying all the matching furniture in the IKEA catalogue, which Fight Club mocks, or scrolling absently through Twitter while in the grocery check-out line. Fight Club reminds me that I don't like being a cog in a machine, and I don't like the kind of clutter that seeps sneakily into my mind and my heart. Unlike Cal Newport, I don't think it's so easy to turn it off. And I don't actually suffer from a lot of FOMO. But I think what has been gripping me about the book is the question that keeps coming up: do I see myself in these pages? Can I honestly say, “That's not me, not even a little bit.”
What do you think?
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