A variety of things that probably only I care about

Fight Club

After reading Noise, I really wanted to try Fight Club. Both stories are nominally wish fulfillment tales about violent young men, but neither actually intends for you to root for them all the way through. Strangely, even though Fight Club is one of the best movies of the last generation, I’d never read the book. It was interesting to read something that was so familiar in some ways (almost all of the voice-overs and speeches are lifted verbatim from the novel), but new in others. I haven’t had an experience like this since I read the novel version of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest more than a decade ago. But where the Cuckoo’s Nest book immediately supplanted the movie for me, the movie version of Fight Club is still definitely my favorite. There is little if anything of import in the book that the movie didn’t also cover, and the prose never put me there in the same visceral way that the movie did. (In contrast, the text in Cuckoo’s Nest offered much that the movie was missing, and its incredible prose was even better than the movie’s acting.)

That’s not to say that the book wasn’t still good. With most of the movie’s text and plot coming from it, how could it not be?

From this point on, there are spoilers for the story.

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