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Showing posts with label speculative. Show all posts
Showing posts with label speculative. Show all posts

Friday, November 20, 2009

review: Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk


Fight Club
by Chuck Palahniuk

The first rule about fight club is you don't talk about fight club.
Chuck Palahniuk's outrageous and startling debut novel that exploded American literature and spawned a movement. Every weekend, in the basements and parking lots of bars across the country, young men with white-collar jobs and failed lives take off their shoes and shirts and fight each other barehanded just 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 violent revenge on an empty consumer-culture world.

adult fiction ; speculative { genre
R for violence and sexual content { rating
August 19, 1996 { first released
W.W. Norton paperback (218 pages) { review edition
bought at full price { acquisition
Amazon.com ; Amazon.ca ; IndieBound ; Book Depository { purchase links

Why I Read This
Assigned for my Media Theory: Consumerism class.

First Lines
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. For a long time though, Tyler and I were best friends. People are always asking, did I know about Tyler Durden.

Overall Rating
☂☂☂☂

A psychological thriller with overt critique on consumerism and wasteful spending, as well as the meaning of being a man in a "generation of men raised by women". The narrator is unintentionally funny in the deadpan way, and while the story skips between events and timelines, it is all the more like you are living inside his insomnia-plagued head. The twist at about two-thirds of the way in was very well played, and ties together a lot of the quirks and seemingly innocently repeated lines since the beginning. There are blatant statements of misogyny towards women, but then again this book details all the wrong ways consumer madness can go. Very effective as a critique, but also works as a grossly intricate and thrilling story.

review posted at Amazon.ca, Book Depository, goodreads, LibraryThing, Shelfari

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

review: Kingdom Come by J.G. Ballard


Kingdom Come
by J.G. Ballard

A gunman opens fire in a shopping mall. Not a terrorist, apparently, but a madman with a rifle. Or not, as he is mysteriously (and quickly) set free without charge...
One of the victims is the father of Richard Pearson, unemployed advertising executive and life-long rebel. Now he is driving out to Brooklands, the apparently peaceful town on the M25 which has at its heart the very shining shoppers’ paradise where the shooting happened – the Metro-Centre.
Then the main suspect is released – thanks to the testimony of self-styled pillars of the community like the doctor who treated Richard’s father on his deathbed. Richard, determined to unravel the mystery, starts to believe that something deeply sinister lurks behind the pristine façades of the labyrinthine mall, its 24-hour cable TV and sports club...

adult fiction ; speculative { genre
PG-13 for violence { rating
January 2006 { first released
Fourth Estate (UK) paperback (280 pages) { review edition
bought at full price { acquisition
Amazon.com ; Amazon.ca ; Book Depository { purchase links

Why I Read This
Assigned for an essay in my Media Theory: Consumerism class.

First Lines
The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world.

Overall Rating
☂☂☂.5

I did enjoy this book as a metaphor-littered philosophical thriller, and it beats the hell out of reading an academic essay on the same topic, but I was a little disappointed in the lack of focus on individual characters/personality.

review posted at Amazon.ca, Book Depository, goodreads, LibraryThing, Shelfari