Book: Fight Club

Has anyone read Fight Club? I spent all week reading, reading, and reading that book. I love the author and I think Fight Club was his most famous novel. I wasn't really into the movie so I never watched it. I'm going to rent it soon though and hopefully later this week I'll have a post about book to movie differences.

Chuck Palahniuk is one of my favorite authors. He's a Portland, Oregon local author and my first experience with him came when I moved to Oregon. My cousin’s had introduced me to his book Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon. My cousins lived in Salem, Oregon from the time they were both in elementary school and they had experienced a different life (to say the least). The first month I lived in Oregon, I was talking with my little cousin Alison, 13 at the time, and she told me that a week prior she had seen an elderly woman get hit by the transit. My cousin Ally and her older brother Evan were both raised in the heart of meth central Salem Oregon. Life wasn't something to look forward to where they were living but they made the best out of it. The reason I bring all this up is the book Fight Club reminds me of a lifestyle that is specific to the way people lived near where my cousins grew up. I would describe Chuck Palahniuk’s novels as the equivalent to horror films. I'm not a fan of watching scary movies and I'm even less of a fan of scary stuff that happens in real life. My cousin told me the story of the lady getting hit by the train as if it was an everyday occurrence and that really scared me. To not think twice about a human life, as if it's disposable, is something I have a hard time understanding.

Fight Club did a good job at explaining how people can live, or not live, with such a grim perspective on life. The monotonous daily grind can get to be too much for someone and they begin to look for something more or maybe something less. Fight Club is about a man who has extreme insomnia, or so you think in the beginning, who tries to find a way to release tension so he can sleep. So the nameless main character and a "friend", Tyler Durden, start the first Fight Club. Tyler slowly starts to become a major part of the main characters life until, you find towards the end of the book, Tyler is really his split personality. There are so many twists and turns as you read this book and the end is not monumental but it's still intriguing. It's hard to tell from the title and the plot and everything crazy that happens in the book, but in the last chapters the reader starts to realize that this is a love story. Wow.. what a book. I think my mind was blown after finishing it.

The Afterword chapter at the end of the book is where the author goes into detail about how he came to write such a twisted story. It all started with 8 rules, rules that had to apply to something. With books on the best seller shelves that were about bringing women together, Chuck Palahniuk, wanted to write a book that would bring men together. So he applied his 8 rules (such as; the first and second rule is "you don't talk about..") to a fight club. He says the rest of the stories where complied after asking his friends for crazy stories like how his friends worked as waiters and tainted peoples food. His friends were skeptical about him putting these real life scenarios in his fiction novel. But the author thought it didn't matter because they were just a bunch of guys with no more than a high school diploma and they probably weren't the first to think of these things. On his book tours he found out he was right. There were already fight clubs in major cities. There were people tainting rich people’s food long before he wrote about it.

What I really found amazing was that Fight Club wasn't even promoted. The publisher gave the author a very small amount of money so he wouldn't write it. But the author didn't know that's why he got such a small amount. He thought that any money was better than none so he wrote it anyway. I think it’s incredible for all that to happen and then for it to be turned into a movie.

This is the third or fourth book I've read by Chuck Palahniuk. The first was Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon. This book explained all the interesting sights and history of Portland. Like the water fountains downtown are called Benson Bubblers.. he wrote why. He also talks about the Shang-Hi tunnels, where back in the 20's there used to be speakeasies in these tunnels and when people got too drunk and passed out they would be hauled out of the tunnels into the ship yard (they were connected) and these people would be sold for human trafficking. He also talks about a self-cleaning house that was built in the early 1900's. It's a great tourist book and has a little of literally EVERYTHING. I gave it to my dad for his birthday the first year we lived in Oregon.

In this last year I read another novel by this author titled Lullaby. This was a great book. Lullaby is about a newspaper writer who had written obituaries for families who have had a baby die of sudden infant death syndrome. The writer starts to notice that all these families have the same nursery book and some have been left open on the last page that was read to their babies. He sees the link and discovers that this lullaby is a culling song that in ancient times was read to people suffering from famine and poverty to ease them into their deaths. Once the writer finds this out he takes up a mission to get rid of this book so babies will stop dying from SIDS. However he learns the culling song and finds that even if he thinks it accidentally he can kill whoever he is thinking about when he says it. Which is a terrible situation to be in if you are manically depressed like this character. He becomes his own worst enemy but he's not the only one who knows of the culling song. He meets a very successful real estate agent who has known about the culling song for years. You might say this story is somewhat of a love story as well (aren’t they all??). The end of this book is so twisted!! I recommend anyone to read it if they could stomach it.

In the spirit of Halloween, I'd encourage everyone to buy a short novel by Chuck Palahniuk. Happy reading everyone!!

Twilight Saga

               I loved reading the Twilight series. They are probably my favorite books to read and reread. I know I’ll probably get a lot of grief for saying that but really if you’ve read them you probably know what I mean. I know there were a lot of crazed teenaged fans for a while and, I won’t deny it, they were ridiculous. While that was going on I wondered, were these kids motivated by the movies or the books? Or, because the movies weren’t as great as the books (of course), did a handful of these kids read the books and the rest are like a bunch of sheep following the heard? They saw the movies and said “yea that’s cool.. I can see why everyone’s in to this..” yea right?

               Like I said in my last post, the first movie almost didn’t make sense unless you read the book. The second movie was better I thought but perhaps that’s because there was more action and less ground work in the book. I haven’t seen the third movie and really I didn’t read the third book either. Actually instead of reading the third book I bought the audiobook. It was like 23 hours of listening and at the time I was moving from Colorado to Oregon (for the second time in my life) and had 20 hours of nothing but road. But really I wish I would have read the book. I don’t remember the third as much and I have a hard time deciding if that’s because I wasn’t as interested in the fighting, or if it’s because I didn’t read it and have to visualize every part. Instead it was fed to me, like watching movies or T.V. shows really isn’t exactly an active process.

               The fourth book was my favorite and I’m glad they are turning it into two movies. It’s been about 2 years since I read the series so I don’t think I’ll be too disappointed if the movies don’t match the book to a T. So really I’m not a crazed Twilight fan but I am excited to see what they’ve done with the last of the series.

My Sisters Keeper

Blog #3

My Sisters Keeper

               Has anyone seen the movie My Sister’s Keeper? It’s about a girl, Anna, whose sister gets cancer at a young age and the whole reason that Anna is born is to give her sister parts of her body. Starting after her birth, she gives her sister cord blood and next she’s five giving her lymphocytes. There are several times in her childhood where she is required by her parents to give to her sister. She’s 12 or 13 when her parents tell her that her sister needs a kidney. So this pre-teen has had enough of giving her (forever recovering) sister body parts and finds herself a lawyer. In the book she saved around $130 and in the movie it’s more like $600 or $700. So in the book Anna does a few odd jobs to make the lawyer take her case. In the movie he takes the case out of charity. Sure that’s a subtle difference but there are other things about the lawyer that were left out. The lawyer has a dog named Judge that is a service dog and no one knows what the dog really does until the end. In the book there are several times when the lawyer makes up stories about what kind of service the dog does for him. He says the dog detects magnets because he has an iron lung. This I the only lie referenced in the movie. So it’s almost a complete shock to the audience at the end when the dog is actually doing his job (I won’t spoil it). The lawyers’ love life is also a huge part of the book but it wasn’t even referenced once in the movie.

               Another change, book to movie, was when talking about Anna and her leukemic sisters’ brother. He’s older, in both, but he is only a problem child in the movie. In the book there is a lot more to his problems. He’s an alcoholic because his parents were too busy helping the sick sister that they didn’t pay attention to him. Another point to be made is that their father is a firefighter (both movie and book). The reason this is important, only in the book, is because the brother likes to start fires in abandoned buildings. Anytime the sister was in the hospital for long periods of time, the brother would set fire to a building. Of course you find this out near the end of the book, that all the fires were started by the brother. In the movie they play his problems off to be severe dyslexia. The whole role is altered in the movie, or so it seemed.

               With all these differences, I thought, “how much different could the movie really get after all this?” Well in the movie they make it seem like the sick sister, Kate, loves Montana. This was never referenced in the book. Kate feels that when she dies she wants to go to Montana. Now this is another difference. Kate seems to hint, several times in the movie, that she is ready to die. I hate to spoil the ending of the movie but I feel it’s necessary to point out how different the two really are. In the movie, Anna’s secret purpose in going to a lawyer for rights to her body is to let her sister die. She did it because that’s what her sister wants and what her sister asked her to do. In the book, it’s what Anna wants and it gets better. She wins her case and, in the end, Anna gets in a car crash right after her case. She gets put in intensive care and dies. At that point the lawyer has rights to Anna’s body/organs. Knowing Kate needs Anna’s kidney or she will die and how Anna felt about giving her kidney to her sister.. What does he decide to do with her organs? Well if you ask I’ll tell you but really.. you should read the book. Happy reading and watching everyone!!