Love Him or Hate Him

Two books down, four to go.  Basically ten months left in the year.

• Guns, Germs, and Steel:  The Fates of Human Societies
• Tell All
• Damned
• A Little Matter of Genocide:  Holocaust and Denial in the Americas from 1492 to Present
• Suttree
• Founding Brothers:  The Revolutionary Generation

 So, the thing about Chuck Palahniuk is you either love him or you hate him.  Tell All could be the breaking point for anyone who has been sitting on the fence about him.  Don't read it if you aren't fully entrenched in his style of writing.  I have now read eight of his books and every time I get into one, I think to myself 'this is it, he has finally lost me.'  Then I finish the book and think 'Goddamn you Chuck Palahniuk!'  I even throw a fist in the air and shake it angrily like an old man.  I got a third of the way through Tell All thinking that nothing will happen.   Then two thirds of the way through I still thought nothing was going to happen.....then the last third of the book.  The twists in his books are what M. Night Shyamalan's twists dream about being.  He always seems to have something in each book that is just different about it.  In Tell All, any name drop was in bold lettering.  A little annoying at first, but it makes sense as you go on.  It's all about name dropping, along with the other parts of the plot.  

The nice thing about his books is that they are fairly short.  This one was under two hundred pages.  A nice break considering the last book I read was a history book.  And over four hundred pages long (still don't regret reading it).  The bad thing about his books is that the hook to get the reader to keep going is past the halfway point.  Oh well, I still love his books.