Due to the fact that I wrote way too much for a blog post, today I'll only add three books. The final three - later this week.
7. Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey, by Chuck Palahniuk
I like Palahniuk. You know, the author of Fight Club. But I don't really like that book.
Anyway, Fight Club was a huge pop culture phenomenon – mostly because of the movie. It started fading about a decade after the book was published, and I have this feeling that Rant is Palahniuk's attempt at creating a new cult hit of that magnitude.
But I don't really like this book either.
Have you read any of his writings? I've read a few, but not in chronological order. It's easy to see Mr. Palahniuk is a very uneven writer. Choke, Lullaby and Haunted are great books. Diary, Invisible Monsters and, unfortunately, Rant, are... not that great.
Even his crappiest works have a lot of qualities though. First of all, they're an encyclopedia of the macabre. Tons of facts you'll never care about, but that make you look smart in front of your friends are listed in every book. There's a lot of humour to be found.The books are very easy to read– his sty1e is minimalistic and makes extensive use of verbs, without any excessive (and useless) balzacian descriptions.
Right at the beggining, we find out that Rant is famous, dead and responsible for an epidemic that killed millions and evolved into some sort of zombie invasion, 28 Days Later sty1e. His story is reconstructed from fragments of „oral histories", memories of his antourage and of people that studied his case. Rant is born with an extraordinary sense of smell and taste. As a kid, he discovers a mysterios source of gold coins that ruins his town's economy, becomes addicted to insect and animal bites (especially venomous bites) and creates diabolic pranks. During his teenage years he moves to the city and here it becomes clear that the novel takes place in a close dystopian future, where the society is split in two: the Daytimers and the Nighttimers.
The portrait of this society is a clear reference to the Eloi and the Morlocks of The Time Machine. The Daytimers are the upper c1ass citizens, an aristocratic bunch that oppresses the Nighttimers. Sirens sound the alarm at dusk and dawn, warning the two c1asses to find shelter. The Nighttimers are passible of severe punishment if they don't hide during the day, and when the epidemy spreads they're shot on sight.
Rant becomes a Nighttimer and gets involved in Party Crashing, a demolition derby that's the main occupation of unemplyoed Nighttimers. Together with a bunch of friends, including Daytimers bored of their life sty1e, he roams the streets at night and becomes more and more involved in these illegal races. Here he meets Echo Lawrence, a girl with a slight handicap that becomes his girlfriend, and together they start the epidemy. Rant's death turns the book into a bizzare sci-fi tale, inspired by some obscure theories about... something which I won't spoil.
The only known photograph of Rant.
The first 4-5 pages actually give away the plot, but this is obvious only once you finish the book. The reader's memory must work at full throttle, because the nature of the oral sty1e implies dozens of references to past chapters. Although the writing is cursive and very easy to follow, the book's labyrinthine nature may prove to be a serious obstacle for some. It's an interesting experiment though.
This all sounds good, isn't it? Well, the reality is not so bright. Palahniuk emulated Fight Club too much – the Party Crashing tries really hard to be the next Club; 3 chapters are dedicated to its rules alone! Coming for a writer renowned for his originality, this is very disappointing.
Furthermore, the similarities between Rant and others of his masochistic heroes become annoying, as is Palahniuk's obsession with the macabre and grotesque. I understand fans like his books precisely because he offers such imagery and twisted stories, but here it's simply too much and too bad. It's not a beautiful or elegant breed of grotesque, like in Haunted or Suskind's Perfume (another obvious inspiration for Rant). It's not funny either, like in Choke. It's just weird, filthy, disgusting and out of place. And this is coming from someone who scrolled all the way down through Encyclopedia Dramatica's Offended page without needing psychiatric help afterwards.
So, despite the cool narrative technique and despite the good story and characters, the accent that he puts on bad macabre elements ruins the book. I don't advise you to read it. Get Lullaby or Choke instead.
8. Sphere, by Michael Crichton
I saw the movie a few years ago. It didn't struck me as particulary good, it was just mediocre, "watchable". Some story elements were very interesting, but eventually it went nowhere. I figured the book must be better.
I only read two of Crichton's books before - The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park. Both are incredible works. He's like a modern Jules Verne, combining a lot of scientific exposition written in a very accessible manner with great action and adventure.
Sphere starts good and gets gradually worse, unfortunately.
A huge spaceship is found at the bottom of the Pacific, and a team of scientists sets out to investigate it. The depth of the coral covering the spaceship suggests it arrived there 300 years ago, but further research reveals it's an American ship that was sent back through time without any crew. On board the ship the scientists find a huge metal sphere of obvious alien origins.
A storm traps the protagonists in their laboratory at the bottom of the ocean. They continue their work, but soon weird **** starts happening. Was an alien creature trapped inside the Sphere? I think you know the answer.
The best element of the book is that a lot of it is dedicated to theories about alien life. Could an alien be immortal, thus not understanding the concept of death? Could it exhale a toxin that destroys chloroplasts, leading to the death of most life on Earth even if it exhales just once? What if it lives in more than three dimensions, so we perceive only part of it? Is alien logic similar to ours? These questions and all things related are a fantastic read.
It's a shame that the book turns into a psychological thriller about halfway through. The ending is obvious, the characters are archetypal and the action is very predictable. You've seen versions of this story countless times before, and it's not one of the best stories ever imagined...
Still, it's an entertaining work. As I've come to expect from a Chrichton novel, the action is violent, often shocking, the pacing is perfect and subtle horror elements spice up the atmosphere. So despite the predictable plot, it gets thumbs up from me. Read other books of his too!
And don't bother with the movie, watch this instead:
9. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by Roald Dahl
I bet you didn't see this one coming. When I was a kid, in the second grade I think, our English coursebook included the integral text of Charlie, spread between chapters. I bought it this summer, curious to see how I'll interpret it now.
It's a very short book – I finished it in about one hour. The subject must be familiar to everybody: Charlie, an extremely poor boy, lives next to Willy Wonka's chocolate factory, the biggest and the best chocolate factory in the world. His family can only afford one chocolate bar per year, at his birthday. Wonka launches a competition: five golden tickets are hidden inside the wrappings of his bars, and those who find them will be granted a day-long tour of the factory and a lifetime supply of sweets. Charlie is one of the winners, and together with Grandpa Joe he visists the marvelous factory, where no human has entered in more than a decade...
These bars were made by Nestle a few years ago
It's a fairly dark tale, with many absurdist elements – reminescent of both Lewis Carrol and 19th century's fairy tales. While it certainly is fun to read, it has a major flaw; the antagonists are the other four children, each of them representing one of childhood's „sins": gluttony, spoiling, TV obsession and gum addiction. The book revolves around criticising these behaviours and punishing the bad kids in a pretty violent manner. The worst thing about it is that once they're punished, the Oompa-Loompas (the workers in the factory) sing something about their behaviour. It comes off as a very heavy-handed moralist work. Simply put, it's annoying and distracting. More subtility would have done wonders!
Anyway, despite these songs and attempts at educating the reader, the book is quite lovely. The imagery and Wonka's sarcastic dialogue are its main strong points. For such a short and (I guess) cheap book, you can't go wrong with it, especially since it's one of the landmarks of modern literature. Read it, and also read J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan books. There's no excuse to pass over these works.