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    Fight Club
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    Fight Club
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    Fight Club
    Audiobook5 hours

    Fight Club

    Written by Chuck Palahniuk

    Narrated by Jim Colby

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    Every weekend, in basements and car parks across the country, young men with good white-collar jobs and absent fathers take off their shoes and shirts and fight each other barehanded. Then they go back to those jobs with blackened eyes and loosened teeth and the sense that they can handle anything. Fight Club is the invention of Tyler Durden, projectionist, waiter and dark, anarchic genius. And it's only the beginning of his plans for revenge on the world...
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherW. F. Howes Ltd
    Release dateSep 1, 2008
    ISBN9781407430805
    Unavailable
    Fight Club
    Author

    Chuck Palahniuk

    Chuck Palahniuk’s fourteen novels include the bestselling Snuff; Rant; Haunted; Lullaby; Fight Club, which was made into a film by director David Fincher; Diary; Survivor; Invisible Monsters; and Choke, which was made into a film by director Clark Gregg. He is also the author of the nonfiction profile of Portland, Fugitives and Refugees, and the nonfiction collection Stranger Than Fiction. His story collection Make Something Up was a widely banned bestseller. His graphic novel Fight Club II hit #1 on the New York Times list. He’s also the author of Fight Club III and the coloring books Bait and Legacy, as well as the writing guide Consider This. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.

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    Reviews for Fight Club

    4/5

    6,125 ratings173 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I enjoyed this book. Didn't blow my mind, but maybe it would have had a different effect had a read it before watching the movie. Chapter 6 was the original short story around which the novel was written, and I found Chapter 6 to be really solid when read as a short story. The rest of the book was slightly less solid, but still enjoyable.
    • 4/5
      This is a hard one to rank. It's great for Chuck Palahniuk but good as a stand alone novel. I just want to put out there that he writes the same novel over and over again (just like sci-fi by Michael Crichton and horror by Stephen King). This is probably his best version of his one book.

      As a stand alone it's hilarious. Dark humor yes, but if you didn't know that going in you'll figure it out soon enough. Hopefully you'll also pick up on the sarcasm. The entire book is written as a wry parody of subversion, rather than being a manual to subversion itself. They all sign up and join a group with a uniform and standard haircut to make sure that they are different... Whether you read it as the army, religion or the many people who read/saw this and wanted to be just like all of those individuals, it fits.

      Fun to read. Not dumb but subtly crafted either.
    • 3/5
      I think I may have enjoyed this book more had I not seen the movie first. I like the author's writing style, but feel at times that it becomes repetitive. Though the book is good in its own right, if I had the choice between reading the book or watching the movie, I'd go with the movie.
    • 4/5
      I was pleasantly surprised by this novel; as someone who hated the Brad Pitt/Edward Norton movie, I didn't expect to enjoy it. But enjoy it I did! It's well paced, and what doesn't come off well onscreen is executed quite nicely in the text. I don't agree with the idea that men aren't "men" anymore because of civilization/commercial values, but it's presented in an interesting way, and definitely worth thinking about.
    • 3/5
      I didn't think I'd be the type to like Chuck Palahniuk's work, somehow. But Fight Club is iconic, and I haven't seen the movie, so I thought -- by my dad's reasoning: he knows about the plots of soaps only because he says something you need to know to get on with other people, and possibly also to win pub quizzes, which both he and I do quite well -- that I'd better read it and find out what's going on.

      I actually enjoyed it a lot. I meant to pick it up for five minutes, read just a little bit, and then get to bed in time. Half an hour later I looked up. Oops.

      Despite never seeing the movie or reading the book -- despite not even being interested -- I figured everything out very swiftly, and I think it's because Fight Club is one of those things that you come across a lot in popular culture, and you just sort of learn about it by osmosis. Or maybe it was that obvious, I don't know, but I enjoyed the unfolding of it, even if I can't say I like the idea of a real Fight Club... I found it an oddly compulsive read for something I was so sure I wouldn't be interested in.
    • 5/5
      Recently, one of my students let me borrow her copy of "Fight Club" and told me that I HAD to read it. So I tried. But I really couldn't get into the first few pages. I hadn't watched the movie "Fight Club" in a really long time, so I decided to go back to the movie. Watching the movie made me remember why I had loved the story so much when I first saw it. I jumped into the book and finished it within just a couple of days. This is not something I usually do, watch a movie first and then read the book. But for some reason, it was necessary for me to have Ed Norton and Brad Pitt and Helena Bonham Carter in my head to truly get into the book. Now that I'm done, I can't wait to revisit the movie again to see how it compares to all the things I just experienced in the book. I won't spoil this review with any of my theories about Tyler or Marla or Bob or the nameless narrator (called Jack in the film), but I will say that I can't wait to talk Abigail (my student) about it on Monday!
    • 2/5
      Re-read. Good, but not as good as first time as it's probably too dependent on the one plot device.
    • 3/5
      Read this to earn your 90s Edgelord Scout Badge
    • 4/5
      Most Iconic Book Set In Each Of The 50 States - DelawareThe unnamed narrator is starting to feel trapped in his perfect life. He has a good job. He has a good apartment. He's filled his apartment with good stuff. Then he stops being able to sleep and things really go off the rails. He begins attending recovery groups at local churches. The emotional intimacy he receives there, the hopelessness and the fear all combine to help him sleep.But a new face starts coming to all the meetings. Her name is Marla Singer and she is a faker. Once again, the narrator can't sleep and that's when he meets Tyler Durden. Tyler is a maniac with a plan to change the world. What starts as an odd friendship and a place to sleep after his apartment explodes turns into a twisted world of dangerous pranks and soap made out of people.This is a fast paced novel that deals with issues of discontent and empowerment. How can the modern man escape the chains of wage slavery and achieve something lasting?
    • 4/5
      Totally not what I was expecting. I didn't watch the movie when it came out and had no expectations when I started the book. The descent into madness is insanely well written (pardon the pun). Trigger warning for violence. There is a lot of it. It's visceral. Horrifically so. I can't say I enjoyed it, but it is a masterpiece. Very iconic.
    • 4/5
      I've never felt so divided about anything I've ever read. The combination of class-conscious underground revolution and quite spot-on analysis of our modern society (or rather the book's contemporary society, ours has moved on since it was written) and the worst kind of macho primitivism is uncanny, to say the least.
    • 4/5
      I liked this book a lot. Quite a lot. I think I'd like to read it again after I think about it some more.
    • 1/5
      An insomniac protagonist creates a secret club where men assault each other. He is then powerless to stop the monster he has created. He and his girlfriend attend cancer victims’ support groups even though neither has cancer.

      I disliked this book. I do not see the point. Perhaps it is meant to say that in order to “feel alive” people need to do more than peacefully coexist? If so, what a horrible message.

      In the Afterword, the author states that this book began as a short story. I can see it would make a decent short story but repeating the same message with slight variations in each of 30 chapters felt like beating a dead horse (so to speak). I thought about not finishing but it is short. Bleak. Depressing. Not for me.
    • 4/5
      I had wanted to read this book for ages! And well, I have officially enjoyed my very first audiobook. It was a new experience.

      Getting back to this book, I dare say the movie is one of my favorites, so I entered the book with very high expectations, maybe even impossible ones. Now that I have read the book, I believe this is one of the very rare cases where the movie is better than the book.

      I wouldn't say that the book is bad. It's just that the film's screenplay is absurdly good and perfectly well cast, starring Edward Norton, Brad Pitt, and Helen Bonham Carter. I would not like to say anything bad about the narrator of this audiobook since he did a good job, but I have grown up so used to Edward's narration style that it is an unsurmountable hill to climb for me.

      The book follows the same premise as the film, so I will focus on some differences, which helps explain why I prefer the movie.
      1. The book's side quest where the protagonist has a fling with Chloe seems off-skelter and distracts the plot too much. The movie avoids wasting time with this, and it is far better for leaving Chloe as a passing tertiary character.
      2. Bob doesn't play much of an important role in the book (outside of his death scene), whereas he is a recurring supporting character in the film.
      3. The limo scene and driver's license human sacrifice scenes are so much better with Tyler Durden in them. Having a random mechanic driving the limo in the book takes away 90% of the life-changing impact of the scene. The mechanic only appears in two chapters of the book and is very meh.
      4. The scene where our protagonist beats himself up and blackmails his boss into staying on payroll in exchange for not pressing legal charges for assault happens in the catering restaurant instead of the protagonist's regular job. The scene is the same; the boss isn't. Moving this scene to the character's regular day job makes more sense because the book enters the quandary that the character is supposed to be financed by the restaurant blackmail. Yet, he continues to show up to work for no logical reason.
      5. Lou doesn't appear in the book. Bummer.
      6. Tyler is more interactive in the film (a visual media like cinema just favors this story, hands down), and the movie's soundtrack further enhances these positives.

      But rest assured, not everything is better in the film. There are two mini-scenes in the book that would have looked great in the movie:
      1. Tyler instructs his space monkeys to perform driver's license sacrifices for project mayhem. The movie is too vague since we only see IDs in the Paper Street house and must guess who collects them.
      2. Marla visits the Paper Street house, and the space monkeys order her to stand outside for 3 days just like everyone else. I found that scene to be hilarious in the book. Maybe they did film it, and the scene is only available in some obscure extended version. Bummer.

      There is scant dialogue in the book. While the social criticism monologues sound brilliant in the film, they started to grate me after a while in the book because there are so few scenes with regular dialogue, and Tyler seldom speaks at all.

      I already knew the ending of the book was different from the film, and it is still good, but I like the movie ending much more. In a nutshell, this is a book with certain story pacing flaws that don't quite live up to the film version, but without this story, we would have never had a Fight Club movie to begin with.

      So I will be nice and give it 3 1/2 stars.
    • 5/5
      It packs a punch to your brain I liked reading this book, it was fun, darkly funny and hypnotic to read. Apparently while Chuck Palahniuk was writing this book, he had the album The Downward Spiral by Nine Inch Nails on repeat and Trent Reznor the singer from Nine Inch Nails had the film Fight Club on repeat while he was writing the album The Downward Spiral. Since I am a big fan of both of these people I think that is inspiring :) If you like gritty, dark stories about self-destructive losers then you will love this book. After awhile, I have to admit, that I get get a bit fed up with the protagonist or other characters talking about the rules of fight club, since it is all about macho men, beating their chests and showing everyone else who is bigger and better than them.I liked the fact that the protagonist suffered from insomnia, and he hated his life, his job and his boss and everything was a copy of a copy of a copy, just like the Nine Inch Nails song A Copy of A which reminded me of the band Nine Inch Nails,Trent Reznor is a inspiring & creative person in various ways. His insomnia is so severe that he can't even tell when he is awake or when he is asleep and dreaming. I did however like the surprising twist about Tyler Durden's character and weather he was just an hallucination, or a separate entity altogether. Overall, I liked the fact that the main protagonist was relatable, and self-destructive till he was severely hurt and still continued on with his job and attending the various different fight clubs or project mayhem.
    • 3/5
      I'm not sure what to write as I feel my opinions and even my understanding of the book were heavily influenced by the fact that I saw the movie before the book.

      I should start by saying that I really enjoyed the movie - the acting, the story, the way it was shot.

      Because I had seen the movie, I knew what was happening in the book, but I honestly feel that had I not seen the movie, I would have found the book rather confusing and disjointed and a little cold.

      The writing wasn't anything special, and I could not bond to any of the characters, even though I loved the same ones in the film. I just never got into it and despite its short length I had to put in an effort to read it. And now I am finished it all seems like a blur with only the movie in my memory.
    • 1/5
      Dead. I'm never going to finish this. I got halfway through, and I don't really want to force myself to go further. I'm tired of feeling about how 'phony' these people are, I'm tired of hearing about how they're terrible to people around them, I'm tired of the descriptions of Tyler Durden's dick. Since I'm no longer in school, I don't have to force myself to finish something that I hate so much.
    • 3/5
      Palahniuk does another stunningly good job, with a story that knocks the air out of you. His descriptions are breathtakingly graphic, but his storytelling is great, and his pacing is also excellent. I am not sure I would have been able to follow this without having seen the movie; it is very possible, but I am not sure. It is definitely a more gritty take on the story. It has all the texture of originality, and is the better of what I have read of Palahniuk's books.
    • 4/5
      I read this Palahniuk novel after already having read a bunch of other ones. There have not been many novels in which we learn more about the author than main characer. I will never understand Palahniuk's fascination, better yet obsession, with bodily functions. For a while I thought it was just a plot mechanism he frequently uses but after seeing talks and interviews I have to conceded that this man is permanently occupied with all the substances the body consumes and produces. Many people have written about how Fight Club is a manifesto against male fragility or other such social topics. I now think it's just an expression of Palahniuk's fascination with the male body. At the same time I think I'm done with this author, I'm just tired of being permanently grossed out.There is one thing I've not been able to figure out regarding this author's motivations. When you've read a number of his books you feel you have to come to the conclusion that Palahniuk is mainly using shock value to get you to read his books. I sometimes think that but this is a rare case where I don't think that's what's going on here. The author seems to be singularly writing to get thoughts and feelings out of his system. Many time's I've wanted to ask if it has helped.
    • 4/5
      I was glad that I'd seen the movie before I read the book, because I'm sure that if I hadn't already understood the characters and knew where the story was going I would have given up a third of the way in out of distaste for the characters and what they were doing.

      That said, this is a well-written, face-paced book that rides the edge of absurdity in such a daring way it's easy to give the story the benefit of the doubt.

    • 2/5
      Seriously could not get enough of the movie. But, reading the book, I have NO idea how they were able to make a movie from this. It's wandering, disjointed, and self-absorbed as a book. I wish I had quit instead of wasting precious reading time finishing this one.
    • 4/5
      There was no denying the pull to this story for me. Because I've seen the movie, I knew pretty much what was going to happen, but it's just such a train wreck that I couldn't possibly look away. Sad when you think of it in the mental illness light, but amazing piece of writing for sure.
      4 stars
    • 4/5
      Loved the movie, and was a bit disappointed with the book because I was expecting something more.
      It is very close to the movie, up until the last part.
      The ending almost made me give 5 stars.
    • 4/5
      Oh dear. Another rating conundrum. Soooo, Fight Club. This book dives right into the action. In fact, Palahniuk serves us bite sized pieces of plot, packed in chapters. His style is pretty unique, post-modern, shall we say. I did not care for it much at first. I don't think I would've been able to follow very well if I hadn't seen the movie (although the last time I saw it was many years ago). Then you get the violence, then he started namedropping brands and listing formulas for explosions and details about his automobilian line of work. I thought, oh shit, no! Another American Psycho! While that book wasn't half bad. It was half-ruined by this tireless namedropping and description of high-tech stuff (which, due to the book being from 1991 becomes a tad risible, HQ tape decks, fuck yeah!). It also, eventually, managed to bore me with over the top torture, which can't be good.

      Anyway, there I was, fearing the worst, and even thinking that for once the movie might have been better than the book, but my worries had been premature. At one point it all clicked, and the namedropping and technical gibberish faded away or was at least used in a stylish way. The book just kept getting better and better. I started to really dig Palahniuk's style of writing and the subject matter was just beyond cool. Dark, cynical and pessimistic? Sign me up!

      I finished it and I thought, wow, hey, that was great. This is one I should re-read and then I might even dig the first bits. Oh and I should watch the movie again, haven't seen that in ages. But wait. The movie! The movie I initially thought was going to be superior to this. Hold on. This book was great, but how cool would it have been had I not known most of the plot (albeit vaguely), had I not known the big plot twist (you don't forget a thing like that)? Then this might have been an easy 5.
      Sure, there were clues all throughout the book, that pointed towards this solution, but I'm slow, I'm sure I would have been surprised as hell. Like I said, I haven't seen the movie for quite a while, but I do remember some things were different.

      I think there was a big explosion at the ending of the movie, with WhereIs My Mind playing. That was cool. In the book he ends up shooting himself and ends up in heaven, which I think is supposed to be a mental hospital. I think Tyler introduces himself as a soap maker on a plane, rather than on a nude beach. I still think the movie was really good, but I can't help but wonder what it would have been like if I hadn't known. It's a bit of a shame. It's also a bit of a shame that no one seems to know the movie was based on a book, which Palahniuk reiterates in a comical fashion in the afterword. I read somewhere on goodreads that he does think the movie is better though. Go figure. I'm sure he would've expected the plot twist as well.

      For now I think this floats around the 4.5 mark. Maybe I'll change my mind. Maybe not.


    • 4/5
      First rule of Fight Club, don't talk about fight club. Makes it kind of hard to write a review about that which you are not supposed to talk about. It is a fine story about one mans mental issues that causes him to go to various support groups to be able to go to sleep.
    • 1/5
      I'm going to stick my neck out here and say that this was possibly one of the worst books I have ever read and managed to finish. On the same hand, I cannot ignore the many 5* reviews so more than likely the problem was with me.We all know the story, mostly from the film, which I saw years ago and obviously thought was ok enough to make me pick up the book when I saw it. The writing I found far too jumping around, the plot disjointed and I really wasn't interested enough to find it out. I won't be reading any more of Palahniuk books if this is supposedly one of the best. I still can't believe I made it to the end, maybe I enjoyed the pain being self inflicted by dragging myself through each page. Hell, maybe I would fit in well at fight club.... I wonder if maybe it was a secret initiation process...... I think the main thing I got from reading Fight Club was to never talk about Fight Club again.
    • 5/5
      Re-read after a few years and it's still a great book. What I love about Palahniuk is that he (I think) is carefully, slowly and almost imperceptibly tearing apart what you think he is glorifying the whole time. For a huge chunk of a story it can be infuriating, but it is completely worth it.
    • 4/5
      I'm not sure what to say about this book, really! I dashed through it in the time it took to listen to 2.5 albums. The writing is tense – short sentences, all action, no detail. The central message of the book is, or seemed to me to be, that working life sucks and life is pointless. It's the protagonist's hatred for his life that spawns his alter ego Tyler, and thus instigates all the events of the book. The thrill of violence, of cruelty, appeals to the men who fight because it's the only escape their have from their monotonous and deeply pointless existence. Of course, the reality is that most working class people's lives are monotonous and miserable, and the book is reasonably class conscious, with for instance this amazing paragraph:

      The people you're trying to step on, we're everyone you depend on. We're the people who do your laundry and cook your food and serve your dinner. We make your bed. We guard you while you're asleep. We drive the ambulances. We direct your call. We are the cooks and the taxi drivers and we know everything about you. We process your insurance claims and credit card charges. We control every part of your life.

      The book is really depressing. Marla's philosophy is that no one should get old, and Tyler clearly has no objection to thrill-seeking in violence and cruelty. The protagonist actually does react against this to a certain extent and claims that Tyler's gone too far, but this is purely out of self-interest - he doesn't want to lose his body to his alter ego Tyler, he doesn't want to be castrated, and he doesn't want Marla (who he's developed some affection for) to die. I guess there's a reason why this book gets called nihilist.

      The other complaint I could make is that it's a book all about machismo, with only one female character, but it didn't really bother me that much; machismo is just the topic of the book. Books can't just explore everything ever - that's why we read a range of books - and this one was self-consciously about machismo and the masculine, so it didn't bother me the way it would have in a book that wasn't about that. And having said that, I'm unsure why I bothered writing this entire paragraph. Because it's something that crossed my mind while reading, I guess.

      Overall, it was quite the page-turner and I enjoyed it, with its appropriately climactic ending and all. I recommend it, especially since it's short! (Jan 2013)
    • 3/5
      I had no idea what I was getting into with Fight Club (except that the first rule is to not talk about fight club) and I was taken for a whirlwind of a story. It's hard to write a spoiler-free review so I'll keep it short and sweet. Palahniuk knows how to craft a mind blowing, raw story. I never knew where he was taking me, which sometimes was great and sometimes frustrating. I also found the halting style of Palahniuk's writing was a hit or miss; again, sometimes I loved it and sometimes it drove me nuts. All in all, an exciting read.
    • 5/5
      Loved this.