Sunday, July 28, 2013

Stranger Than Fiction by Chuck Palahniuk

Continuing the Chuck Palahniuk series, I finished Stranger Than Fiction {True Stories}. It was pretty good. An easier read and less intense and disturbing than the novels of his I've read.

This is post Fight Club written in 2004 and the author is a bit more self aware shall we say. The book is a series of essays in several sections. The first section is crazy stuff Chuck saw through America like an annual demolition derby of farm combines. The middle section Chuck seems to be visiting/interviewing interesting offbeat type celebrities like Juliette Lewis and Marilyn Manson. The third section is Chuck writing in his own voice about meeting Brad Pitt (who recurs throughout the book), Hollywood life, the experience of being a famous author, his relationship with this father and the deaths in his family on his fathers side. He also discusses writing and some authors and writing style Chuck admires.

You would definitely have to read Fight Club first to appreciate this book. I liked it. Chuck is lucky, the former technical writer sitting in some corporate office writing about diesel engine drivetrains, then boom, this book he wrote and had pretty much forgotten becomes a phenomenon and Chuck becomes an unlikely part of the New York / LA scene - he seems to love every minute of it. I hope would too if that happened to me.

There's still some more Palahniuk to go through and I enjoy his work. So will continue this series.

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