i don't know how it is possible that i missed this, my very favorite book of all time. you've all seen the movie so you all know the plot but, in novel form the characters take on a life of their own.

I saw the movie Fight Club after reading the book, and concluded that the book was much more entertaining. While not a groundbreaking work of literature (Palahniuk's style is shock-oriented and nothing that hasn't been done before), it's still a fun read if you like books that make you nauseous.

"Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken."

"For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone. I have to wash out and flatten my soup cans, and account for every drop of used motor oil. And I have to foot the bill for nuclear waste and burned gasoline tanks and landfilled toxic sludge dumped a generation before I was born."

"You know, the condom is the glass slipper of our generation. You slip it on when you meet a stranger. You dance all night then you throw it away. The condom, I mean. Not the stranger."

It's impossible to know where to begin with this book. I saw the movie before I read it. The film was why I ended up wanting to read it.

The person that recommended this book before me said that in the novel the characters take on a life of their own. While this is entirely true, what she didn't say was how this thoroughly engrossing novel takes on a life of its own not only through its characters, but through its larger themes and judgments that it makes on society as a whole. The situations that the unnamed narrator and main character find himself in are like hilarious train wrecks that you can't take your eyes off of. From self-help groups on testicular cancer and brain parasites to rendering soap from human fat.

This wildly inventive and caustic novel just goes on and on. In a way it is more vivid than the film, because your mind has to create its own crazy images, and come to its own conclusions on the barrage of moral and social dilemmas. Without the urging of film gods or carefully planned images.