divine angst

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

The book was good. Having seen the movie, the twist was a little ruined for me. Mr. Angst tried to fake me out by saying, “What if I told you the twist was different in the book than in the movie?” but I was already far enough into the book at that point that I could easily see that the twist was the same as in the movie.

Mr. Angst saw me reading this and told me this was the one book he read that he thought was WORSE than the movie made from it.

I don’t know if that’s fair; I just think the movie was a really fair representation of the book. I mean, it’s a short book, so there’s not a lot that gets left out in the movie, and Palahniuk writes in a very terse, clipped way that I can see lending itself to a screenplay adaptation.

So I guess the best I can say is that I enjoyed the read mostly because it was a refreshing shift from the other book I’m currently reading (a Pulitzer-Prize-winnning biography of Hirohito). The story was good, if not a new story to me, and the writing was clean and easy.

I’d recommend this as a summer read. Sure, the story is sort of bizarre and graphic in places, but it was still a good poolside book.