Basket.

Another Sunday night in Paradise... ha I wish lah, what the fuck. Actually it isn't different from any other.

Finished another Chuck Palahniuk book today; my third for the year. Now Fight Club was violent, Survivor plain disturbing and Choke is just... sick. Real sick. Then again, why would I read it if it wasn't? Loads of fun stuff in there, from auto-erotic asphyxiation to enemas to zoo animals masturbating. Cool ain't it? And the rest of it is just plain weird. Palahniuk's usual version of an uncaring, unchanging, "normal" world is but a facade that hides a much more sordid face of society, where the theme park staff are either sex addicts or high on drugs, where the protagonist makes a healthy living by pretending to choke in restuarants and where the anarchic take on a well-ordered society (what we would call "normal") and serve to make it a far more interesting place.

Indeed, Palahniuk's fast-paced novel, with his trademark short paragraphs and simple, hard-hitting sentences, left me breathless. All three of his books attack the peaceful, well-ordered society we see and interact within everyday; his loud decrying of the boiredom of it all is manifested in all of his characters who seem neither to be heroes nor villains: just rejects, those left behind by just such a society, those who never in fact knew normal life as society dictates it to be. None are thus "normal", and the book takes on a surreality right from the beginning when the protagonist gets off with a girl he barely even knows in a room next door to his sex addiction group meeting. Weirdo, many will think. Yet as the story develops, the reader finds he is much, much more than a weirdo.

Overall, an excellent read that will make you think, as all his others books did to me. You may not really get it in the end, but you will ahve a hell of a ride getting there.