Posts
"Number one best selling author Chuck Palahniuk presents Pygmy
, a comedic and satirical take on American xenophobia. As part of a massive terrorist plot, a handful of young adults head to the Midwestern United States disguised as foreign exchange students. Palahniuk focuses on one of the young terrorists, Pygmy, who chronicles his time in the American Midwest as he and others plan a horrific, spiteful act." (From the CD container.)The broken English in which the entire book is written actually made it funnier than it would have been otherwise and added a layer of emotion to the serious parts that may have ended up lacking impact. Telling the experiences of Operative Me in straight-up, easily coherent language would have sounded just plain stupid for the most part. Kudos to Palahniuk for realizing that and finding new ways to introduce juvenile comedy and general crudity into our reading. At the same time, the bizarre presentation effectively exposes the good, the bad, the humor and the hypocrisy in some of Western culture's most closely held customs, beliefs and institutions and in human eccentricities. The reader must, however, wade through a lot of Palahniuk's patented disturbing weirdness to get to the heart of the matter.
If you've never read a Chuck Palahniuk novel, I wouldn't start here. I'm thinking there are not going to be many readers who aren't already big fans of his literary shock jock ways who are going to go the distance with this offering. The ones that do will be rewarded with the sort of oddly touching ending we've come to expect and that usual post-Palahniuk uneasy feeling of suspecting you shouldn't have liked it as much as you did if you don't want to be hauled off to the psychologist for some sorely-needed analysis.
The curious can read a PDF of the first chapter of Pygmy on Amazon
. Additional Books 'N Border Collies posts about Palahniuk books can be found here.Other bloggers' thoughts on Pygmy:
Back To Books
is the "book about books" I'm a tiny bit jealous I didn't write. It now serves as my current inspiration. What I really loved about it was that it was less about the books themselves than about the reading life, what it's like to be a dedicated reader. I know many people who read this generated wonderful lists of books they wanted to read, but I was more intrigued by the stories about the act of reading -- the ups and downs and weird obsessive behaviour we reading addicts tend to engage in.
, I was all set to find some DVDs of Hector Mann's films until I remembered he's not real. I wanted to experience for myself the magic of the works described so vividly in the book and to suddenly realize that wasn't possible was almost like a slap in the face. The book deeply explores the many people we are inside, the person we choose to present to the world at different times and who those personae belong to, so the need to come to terms with the fiction of all the creations in their entirety was an odd sensation. I could have sworn I knew them for real! Which, I believe, was part of the point. Who, including ourselves, do we know for real? And do we need to really know someone for that particular relationship to be meaningful to us or to be a force that shapes our lives?
and 
, because I read 
tells the story of a woman of extraordinary beauty and ambition who, catching the eye of the newly crowned boy king, marries him in secret and ascends to royalty. While Elizabeth rises to the demands of her exalted position and fights for the success of her family, her two sons become central figures in a mystery that has confounded historians for centuries: the missing princes in the Tower of London whose fate is still unknown." (From the cover flap.)
. Unfortunately, it didn't live up to my expectations.