Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

Chuck Palahniuk is one of those incredibly creative, strange, and complex writers that is extremely rare to find. His work covers a wide variety of topics, and often satires society in a way that I have previously never read before. Fight Club is no exception. Now, most people have seen the movie, but few actually know that it was a book first. I have both read the book and watched the movie, and I absolutely adore both, but the book puts you in a certain mindset by the end that you just can't achieve from the screen.

Fight Club follows an unnamed man who goes to support groups, pretending to have deadly diseases, in an effort to combat his insomnia. He eventually meets another man named Tyler Durden, who is incredibly mysterious. They soon become close friends, and create an underground fighting club in the basement of bars to help relieve stress. Things escalate quickly and suddenly the unnamed protagonist's life is spinning out of control, and he soon loses track of who he is when he is awake, and who he is when he is asleep.

I don't know about you, but I personally love books that make you rethink and reevaluate yourself. This book mocks our innate materialism, as well as our mundane, meaningless adult lives. In one scene of the book, the protagonist describes his obsession with ordering furniture and decorations from Ikea catalogues, and complains about his efforts to find which dining set "defines him." Having the materialism in our society mocked so blatantly really made me realize how much our lives revolve around getting the newest technology or fad. The majority of us spend our lives working a dead-end job that we hate so that we can afford to continue to buy these meaningless material objects. But why? It's as if we are dead long before we take our last breath. This is the idea that is examined in Fight Club, in extreme sarcastic detail.

Not only is this book thought provoking, but it also keeps you on the edge of your seat. I can guarantee that you will not anticipate the ending, and it will probably leave you pretty confused. I had to reread the ending two or three times in an effort to convince myself that it really happened. After finishing the book, I highly recommend the movie. It does a fantastic job of capturing the essence of the book without following it word for word. I also think that the ending of the movie is perhaps even better than the book ending.

This is an incredibly well written book, and it has the ability to make you question the way that you are spending your life. To me, that is the ultimate sign of a good book; it makes you think.

"You buy furniture.  You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life.  Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled.  Then the right set of dishes.  Then the perfect bed.  The drapes.  The rug.  Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.  - Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk.