Strong Beginning

     The most important line of the first chapter of Fight Club is: "Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler's pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die." This is also the first sentence of the book, which emphasizes it quite a bit more and makes it more memorable. Right off the bat, Palahniuk shocks the reader with this impacting line to showcase Tyler's personality. He is evil. Well, he turns evil because at the beginning of the narrator's story, he explains that they were best friends. This really engaged me from the beginning. I couldn't shake it from my mind because it kind of gave me chills. The author reaches out from the book and slaps the reader across the face, which really grabs their attention. I think this is a very strong and powerful beginning that I don't find in most books. Hopefully there will be more of these WOAH moments throughout the book to make it a very enjoyable read.

Character Symbols

     Tyler Durden, one of the main characters from Fight Club is very similar to a cruise boat. This symbolizes him because a cruise boat is very tall and powerful. Tyler is very sturdy and able to "stay afloat." By this I mean that he is able to make ends meet. He is very powerful because he, along with the narrator started a club where members fight until they bleed. And then they fight some more. He is the leader of the club and everyone respects him to the point where they will do what he tells them to. Cruise boats are very sturdy and stay afloat, unless you count the Titanic. And all those other shipwrecks and stuff.

     A symbol for the mainest of the characters, the narrator, is Squidward. He is bored with life. He is apathetic about everything. And he has insomnia. Squidward is very dull, always speaking in a monotone voice. He hates his job and just about everything else. Except his weird obsession with his clarinet. You could also say he gets very little sleep because Spongebob is always causing a ruckus that keeps him up late at night.

Chuck Palahniuk

     Chuck Palahniuk (paula-nick) is the author of the book I am currently reading, Fight Club. He is a very famous author who has written 19 novels. Some of his more popular books are Invisible Monsters, Survivor, and Choke. However, definitely the most commonly known is Fight Club.

     He was born February 21st, 1962, making him 52 years old at the time of writing this. He lived in a mobile home in Burbank, Washington until he was 14 and his parents divorced. This caused him to live with his mother's parents on their ranch. When Chuck's father was 3 years old, his father shot and killed his wife over the cost of a sewing machine while he hid under a bed. Then, he saw his father turn the gun on himself, all at such a young age. What an awful, horrible, tragic event. Palahniuk began writing for fun while in grade school, and in highschool was awarded "Most Wittiest". He graduated school at the University of Oregon with a bachelor's degree in journalism. For a while, he lived a normal life, until he began writing fiction in his thirties. He had his big break when he wrote Fight Club. After a few years, a movie was produced starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. This book and movie have achieved a 'cult following' and has won an many awards.

   
     His writing style is very dark in almost all of his books. Maybe that had to do with his bad childhood, or maybe not. Either way I really enjoy his writing so far in Fight Club and will probably try reading Survivor after I finish. He also has his own website if you would like to take a peek at that, here it is.

New Book - Fight Club

     I have just began a book titled Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk. This great read has won 2 awards for its fabulousness and has been turned into an academy award winning film. I heard about the movie first, about a year or so ago, and my parents told me I shouldn't watch it. So I finished the movie and loved it. It is definitely one of my favs now up there with Office Space (Dog, check it out). I then learned that it was a novel before a movie after watching it a second time, and figured I'd check that out. Then, I didn't do that. But now I am doing that! So yeah. Cool.

     I am only at the beginning and I am already greeaaatly pleased with my decision. Palahniuk has a very unique and amazing writer style. In this book, the tone is very dark and a little twisted. I kind of like that because it is almost never boring and very descriptive. He also uses very gruesome word choices instead of regular words to add some spice to the pages. I predict that when he is describing the fight scenes in their basement later, I'll want to throw up. But I won't, because I'm a man. A lot of times when I start to read a book, I never actually finish it unless I really, really enjoy it. Unless I really want to know how the book ends, I'll just put it down and eat some Cheerios. Now I already know how it ends, even though the book has some differences than the movie, but I have a feeling I am going to read this from start to finish because of the incredible author and how different from other books this one is.

By the way, I just figured out that the author has decided to make a sequel in graphic novel format. So if you're into that kind of stuff, you should check that out as well.

Fahrenheit 451

     I have just gotten a new book called Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk. I really enjoyed the movie when I saw it last year. I've seen it many times afterwards and believe it to be one of the best movies of infinite existence. From reading about it online, I also learned that the book (like most) is funnier, more sarcastic, more violent, and way better than the movie, though the film was still amazing. So I snatched a copy at Barnes & Noble to snuggle up in a blanket and feel the warm glow of the fireplace on my little toesies while I smoked the most elegant of pipes in the most elegant of manners. However, I have had to start reading another book titled Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury at the same time. I very much dislike reading multiple novels at once because I get confused and tend to mix up the plot and characters between the stories. So, I have not read a single word of Fight Club yet which means the only thing I have to blog about is the book we are reading for class.

     Fahrenheit 451 is a gold mine. It speaks miles of truth about society and the government in such a clever way.

First Blog Post of New Tri

     My favorite book that I read last trimester was John Dies at the End by Jason Pargin. I really enjoyed this amazing piece of literature because it had all the essential elements needed for a great story. It was exciting, sparking my curiosity from the beginning as I read the title. It had very convincing characters, such as David and John who were bored with their lives until they were introduced to a new street drug, Soy Sauce, that changed them forever. Overall, I loved it because it was hilarious for not only what ridiculous things that happened, but also the way the author described everything. His tone was very apathetic, just like David, and it really helped you get inside David's head to see the world from his point of view. I would rate this book a 5/5 stars and it has become my favorite book of all time. Also, there is a movie version that is also very funny, but I believe the book is infinitely better and would definitely recommend reading the book before watching the movie.

Blogger Reflection

     I believe that I have demonstrated growth as both a reader and a writer throughout this trimester. Although I did not reach my goal that I had set out to achieve in the beginning of the trimester, I still firmly believe that I have advanced my skills as a reader. Before this LA class started, I read at a pretty slow pace, just because I couldn't concentrate very well when reading. However, finishing John Dies at the End took a significantly shorter time than my summer reading book. This was because it really grabbed my attention and entertained me. The author’s style of writing, as I referred to in my previous blog post The End Has Come, “Jason Pargin writes in a satirical manner that conveys Dave's thoughts as captivatingly strange and I just become enveloped in his thoughts. He also is very descriptive when he writes and I can imagine every detail of the ridiculous monsters in the story.” That is why I really enjoyed this book, easily becoming one of my favorites.

     Also, there is a great amount of figurative language cleverly put into the story to enhance the setting and characters. One example is when the narrator falls into a trance after seeing a mural on the wall. This starts a brilliant description of every minute detail painted by the artist. This part of the story helped me find figurative language within a text and be able to pull meanings and symbolism from it. In the mural from the book, the woman represented how he felt lonely sometimes and wanted to find a girl that he could talk to about anything and would love him no matter what. I think this skill taught me to analyze writing in a more intelligent way.

     This novel has also influenced my writing techniques. One strength I gained with blogging from reading this book was that I wrote stuff that was entertaining to the readers. My independent book was extremely captivating to me, which gave me the idea that if I am interested while I am typing, then readers will feel the same way while reading. This improved the quality of my writing by making my blog more interesting.

     Over the course of this class, I have also gained a better understanding of theme and characters. My lack of understanding is shown in one of my earlier blogs, Drugs Theme. In this post I wrote, “A thematic statement for the book, JDATE (John Dies at the End), is that when a person does drugs, terrible consequences might follow.” Looking back on this post, I now realize that this was a very generic theme with no real value to it. It might be true, however it is not a well written thematic statement for the book. In my last post The End Has Come, I showed my better understanding of theme by creating a new one for my novel. “That theme is Friendship. This is very present throughout the entire story and even when John dies, he and Dave still communicate and make each other laugh… This theme is not only a theme for this story, but also in countless others including ‘SpongeBob Squarepants’ and ‘Shrek.’” This post demonstrated my knowledge of theme because I explained how it was constant throughout the entire book, and also gave connections to other stories with the same general theme.

     My comprehension of characters has also improved after having experience with blogging. In another one of my first few blog posts called John Dies at the End, I tried to give examples of characterization stating, “If John wasn't as crazy, curious, or always partying as hard as he did, John wouldn't have stayed after the party to talk to Bob Marley. This means that neither John nor Dave would've taken the Soy Sauce and the story would never have happened.” I believe this was a bad example of my understanding of characters. It sounds more to me like just cause and effect sentences. This has changed throughout the trimester as shown in The End Has Come, where I blog, “Dave, the narrator, is extremely apathetic towards everything in his boring life. The author makes it very easy to imagine him mumbling in a monotone voice everything that he says at the beginning.” This gives clear explanation of who Dave is and a reader can fully understand what this character might look, sound, and act like in the book.

     These are just some of the many ways I believe I have grown as a reader and writer. After this trimester of reading and blogging, I feel like I have advanced many of my skills, including writing more descriptively and entertainingly, analyzing the text, and understanding of theme and characters. These are very important skills to have, especially as I continue my path through the Honors English classes, but also in the real world.