Fight Club by @chuckpalahniuk

By Pamelascott

Every weekend, in basements and parking lots across the country, young men with good white-collar jobs and absent fathers take off their shoes and shirts and fight each other barehanded for as long as they have to. Then they go back to those jobs with blackened eyes and loosened teeth and the sense that they can handle anything. Fight Club is the invention of Tyler Durden, projectionist, waiter and dark, anarchic genius. And it's only the beginning of his plans for revenge on a world where cancer support groups have the corner on human warmth.

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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. 1

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(@vintagebooks, 30 November 2011, first published 1996, ebook, 224 pages, borrowed from @GlasgowLib via @OverDriveLibs, # popsugarreadingchallenge, A bestseller from the 1990's)

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This is an intense, bizarre read. I've heard a lot of good things about the author but have never got around to reading his work. I really enjoyed Fight Club and also have a copy of his novel Haunted on my TBR list. I have a vague memory of seeing the movie years ago but don't recall it making much of an impression so read this with an open mind. This is one of the strangest books I've read, and I love Murakami so that's saying a lot. I never completely got what the book was about but somehow that was okay. Who is the narrator? Who's Tyler? Just what the hell is Fight Club? I kept reading and hoping for it all to slide nearly into place. It never quite did but I enjoyed the bizarre journey the book took me on.