I first learned of the author after watching Fight Club five billion times with my friends, upon seeing a friend reading the book I didn't know existed. I finally read a couple books by Palahniuk several years later, and enjoyed them. Though the Fight Club novel is wonderful, and the movie owes everything to it, I must admit I enjoyed the movie more. The author is just a bit dark for my taste, but he is also brilliant, creative, and knows how to bruise the ol' brain batter just right. So I keep coming back like some abuse addicted lover.

This, the third book I've read by Palahniuk, is less dark (than Survivor and Fight Club), but just as creative and immersive. Don't get me wrong, there were still a number of moments when I felt punched in the gut... but in a good way?

Anyways, I recommend this book to anyone, as it shares little nitch worlds that most people never think about, and provides one the opportunity to increase their empathy.

I'm pretty sure that Palahniuk's writing is a fight club. It's like visiting some secret dark basement, where the author dishes out punch after punch. Laying us out on sweaty concrete, bleeding and wondering what the fuck we've done with our lives, yet embracing the pain. Then there are moments when reading can lead us to throw mental punches at the rest of this fucked up world, and feel comfort in knowing that we're standing over it with bruised knuckles, thinking we're at least not the scum laying on the subfloor. Or maybe I'm just fucked up.

Lonely Person

All my books are about a lonely person looking for some way to connect with other people

The dream is a big house, off alone somewhere

Writing Novel

You plan and research. You spend time alone, building this lovely world where you control, control, control everything

You stay in your story world until you destroy it. Then you come back to be with other people

Reading a books is not a group activity

In my own cycle, it goes: Fact. Fiction. Fact. Fiction

Journalist and Novelist

The journalist is always rushing, hunting, meeting people, digging up facts, researching. Cooking a story

The novelist imagines it

Writing. Or theater, or music. Some shared vision. A mutual quest that would keep you together with other people who valued this vague, intangible skill you valued

Fight Club

I started telling myself a story about a guy who haunted terminal illness support group to feel better about his own pointless life

Support Groups

Support groups serve the role that organized religion used to. We used to go to church to reveal the worst aspects of ourselves, our sins. To tell our stories. To be recognized. To be forgiven. And to be redeemed, accepted back into out community

Staying connected to people resolve our anxiety

Anywhere people had nothing left to lose, that's where they told the most truth

Storytelling

The world is made of people telling stories

We live our lives according to stories

You want to give the reader a break from their own life. From their own life story

This is how I create a character. I tend to give each character an education and a skill set that limits how they see the world

A big segment of storytelling is about personal suffering. There's the stink of catharsis

This is your life, but processed

Selling your story. To turn that misery into big money

Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger pointed out how human beings tend to look at the world as a standing stock of material, ready for us to use. As inventory to be processed into something more valuable. Trees into wood. Animals into meat. He called this world of raw natural resources

Is it possible to exploit your own life for the sake of a marketable story

Legacy

As more people grow old, with the experience of a lifetime to remember, the more they worry about losing it. All those memories. Their best formulas, stories, routines for making a dinner table burst into laughter. Their legacy. Their life

Boredom and Fiction

How can we create exciting, edgy books and movies if we only live boring, sedate lives?

Fiction is a safe laboratory for exploring ourselves and our world

Instead of life letting just happen, we could outline our own personal plot

The worst part of writing fiction is the fear of wasting your life behind a keyboard. The idea that, dying, you'll realize you only ever lived on paper

Slang is the writer's color of palette

Invisible, Eternal World

All our problems and all our blessings could be readily dismissed because they'd be no more real than plot events in a book or movie. An invisible, eternal world would render this world an illusion

Software of Fiction

Fiction is a software code that operates in the hardware of your mind

So why I write. Because most of times, your life isn't funny the first time though. Most times, you can hardly stand it

That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect

And writing makes you look back

Because since you can't control life, at least, you can control your version

Kierkegaard

Adam in the Garden of Eden, happy and content until God shows him the Tree of Knowledge and says, "Don't eat this". Now Adam is no longer free. There is one rule he can break, he must break, to prove his freedom, even if it destroys him. Kierkegaard says the moment we are forbidden to do something, we will do it. It is inevitable

Hollywood

Hollywood creative people to brainstorm terrorist scenarios

We want to know every way we might be attack . So we can be prepared

Million New Reasons

What's coming is a million new reasons not to live your life. You can deny your possibility to succeed and blame it on something else

Stop living as a reaction to circumstances and start living as a force for what you say should be. What's coming is a million new reasons to go ahead

Raccolta d articoli e racconti dell'autore di Fight Club che oscillano temporalmente sia prima che dopo la sua opera più famosa.
Alterna realtà e fantasia e non sempre si capisce cosa sia cosa. Si passa dai racconti che fanno riflettere a quelli che non ti fanno ''dormire la notte'', grazie anche alla sua scrittura vivida.
La seconda parte sono una raccolta di interviste a personaggi famosi, interviste scritte in modo particolare, quella a Marilyn Manson per esempio è sprovvista delle domande, e le risposte sono intervallate dalla lettura dei tarocchi fatto dallo stesso Manson. Sono dei tipi di interviste che ti permettono di immergerti al pieno nell'atmosfera.
La terza parte del libro sono degli scorci della sua vita personale un po' auto-promozionali essendo quasi sempre citato Fight club.

Leggibile sia tutto di un fiato sia un racconto alla volta.
(Ci sono molti riferimenti a Fight Club in tutto il libro quindi consiglio di leggerlo prima o almeno aver visto il film)

A compilation of non-fiction essays; journalism-style pieces about different true events (derbies, wrestling, etc.), celebrity profiles, and some personal anecdotes.
I loved the essays about story-telling, examination of writing and society, capturing reality vs. illusion.
I was less impressed by the journalistic pieces that were more action-based and focused on technical descriptions. The opening essay in particular is intense, his covering of a trucker pornography festival in rural America. I almost didn't keep reading, but I'm glad that I did.
Some pieces didn't hold my interest, but it was worth reading for the gems I found.

A good read if you're interested in writing and/or raw, masculine journalism.

Kurgudan da Garip kitabında Palahniuk'un kitaplarının nasıl yazdığını ve bazı bölümlerini nerelerden ilham aldığını okuyabiliyorsunuz.
Kimi zaman hikayenin kendisine gelmesindense ona gitmesini anlatırken, kimi zamanda yalnızca garip olan çevresinden dolayı bu hikayelerin ortaya çıktığını görüyoruz. Tabi bu olayların zekice bir kurgu içinde kitabın bölümlerine dönüştürmesi onun ne denli iyi bir yazar olduğunun kanıtı niteliğinde.
Bu kitabı okumadan önce kafanızdaki dahi Palahniuk tanımı biraz daha zeki ve çevresini çok iyi gözlemleyen bir Palahniuk tanımına doğru kayıyor. Ki bu şekliyle yazar gözümde daha bir itibar kazanmakta.
Aslında ilk şu kitabı daha sonra diğerini okumak gibi bir sıralama yapılamaz fakat bu kitap kesinlikle en sonda okunması gerekir.

Avaliar livro do CP nunca é fácil. O cara não alivia; vai fundo no detalhe em situações grotescas como se tivesse descrevendo uma paisagem bucólica. Também porque escreveu uma obra-prima (Clube da Luta), cujo filme é ainda melhor que o livro, então ele mesmo criou uma âncora para sua obra muito difícil de igualar. Daí que decidi parar de ler livro dele. Mas um dia apareceu essa sugestão num formato mais contos / crônicas, onde fica evidente que é um autor com alto desvio padrão, dado o desnível entre essas diferentes histórias do livro. De qualquer jeito, ler seus livros é ter a certeza que você vai fazer orelhas / marcações em algumas páginas, porque ele sempre vai contar algo interessante, sugerir pesquisar mais sobre um determinado assunto, já que no fundo é um cara muito curioso e as pessoas curiosas - quase sempre - são muito interessantes...

After many failed attempts to finish reading the book, I finally reached the last page of Stranger than Fiction by Chuck Palahniuk yesterday, June 25, 2024. With a total read time of 5 hours and 6 minutes spread over 48 days, more than half of which I completed yesterday, I can finally say that the book isn’t for me. Although I have grown to love nonfiction and short stories, this collection didn’t resonate with me, except perhaps for a few parts.

There were times that I had to remind myself that I was reading, not because I was lost in the magic it brings me, but because barely anything registered to me. For the most part, I felt like I was listening to someone tell me about his adventures as I nodded, smiled, and pretended to understand and care about what he was saying. It is a recollection of stories that do not leave a lasting impression on me, not because they’re badly written but because they are just stories with nothing to tell. They are empty, full only of words that, as he describes them, “burnt tongue,” (twisting words to slow down the reader) yet at the same time invited me to only “skim along a surface of abstract images.”

Still, I found the book’s last section quite good—it resonated more with me, revealing some flesh and wounds and ideas that existed in Palahniuk’s “spirit (or perhaps brain in a body).” It was more personal and added layers to who Palahniuk is as a person distinct from his being the Fight Club’s writer. Although I know what Fight Club is (the movie version, at least), I did not expect some parts of the book to center on it, as if the writer expects that the readers would only know him through it and be interested because of it. I think I wanted more and gained less. Indeed, the stories did not make me laugh, and a moment later broke my heart. He should continue writing fiction, maybe that’s where the true strength of his “horses” lies.

In the spirit of this years motto, to boldly go where my inclinations have never led me to browse,I applied myself to finishing this collection of essays.I had liked the introduction very much but got bogged down immediately in alien territory and put it aside.Although he is better known as a novelist, I reasoned that if I was going to read only one thing by him, this might be the book to give me some kind of perspective on Palahniuks work.I determinined to finish with it already.I started agin with the introduction.

If I had been anticipating a barrage of chauvanistic observations this prejudice was quickly laid to rest in the opening essay. Palahniuk is a keen and sensitive observer and he can write. His comments about the process and the reasons why he finds writing so gratifying were all pertinent to me, but even when he is writing about things that rather appall me,like extreme sports with farm machinary, he writes with such appreciation that finally even I can.

Actually, many of the stories captured my interest. I especially was fascinated by the one on American castle builders,and the essay on Amy Hempel gives some great leads. He also drops well thought out little nuggets referencing some of the great thinkers. Jefferson I might expect but I was pleasantly surprised to find a good precis of the essence of the philosophy of Kierkgaard. Taken together, the stories offer a cultural spectrum of America, and in fact, most of stories offer some great leads for our own inspiration.

What I like most about Palahniuk is his embracing of life in all its its astounding variety and aspects. Even writing about the sordid underside of the glimmering canopy, he retains his fresh perspective.We are not contaminated by his observations or despair. Curiously, the after effect of this book was hopeful.

I will admit I was a little bored by his demolition car story, and the testicle festival wasn't my cup of tea, but the rest of the (chapters? essays?) I was in love, and as a whole I can definitely say I loved the book. I recommend this to anyone who likes good writing and smart writing and funny writing and isn't a sensitive reader topic/description wise.

Chuck Palahniuk is a genius. He is funny, cohesive, and writes very well: eliminating cloggy words but not going overboard (you know- when you can tell the aim is artistic fluency, but it really sounds like a stage actor cheesily overacting an already overdramatic scene, like "the wind--it hurts. The pain! My love. Oh life!") and picking out the good parts of a story. I love his voice. I love that he made me laugh out loud. Several times. I loved how real his "portraits" of others felt. He talks to you like a normal person, not super loaded and elegant syntax-wise or with diction that's just there to prove you know every four-syllable word in the dictionary. He is just...awesome.

4.8!

i need to talk to chuck palahniuk in person

Terminé «Error Humano», de Chuck Palahniuk. Es lo primero que leo de él, y ya logró que lo quiera y lo envidie.

El libro se divide en tres: «Gente reunida», «Retratos» y «Personal». Su nombre los describe lo suficiente.

Todos son relatos cortitos que cuentan historias tan interesantes como extrañas.

Desde un festival de sexo donde todos garchan porque sí hasta su paso por Los Angeles durante la época de «El club de la pelea».

Tiene una franqueza y simpleza que nos hace sentir identificados. Se acerca mucho al lector. Todo con una crudeza espectacular.

Desconozco el resto de sus libros, pero «Error Humano» se destaca por la diferente forma de mirar la realidad que lo rodea, de interpretar.
 
Lo mejor es que los protagonistas son personas raras. Como Palahniuk, como todos.

[Reseña escrita originalmente para Twitter]

I'm a huge fan of Palahniuk, but I guess now I ought to specify and say I'm a huge fan of Palahniuk's fiction work. His nonfiction was ok, some interesting things, but nothing with a wow factor like his other books. The autobiographical material was the most interesting one, but as a whole it just didn't interest me that much. Just an ok read.