I got Pygmy from the library's "New Fiction," a little by accident. I read Fight Club hungrily at sixteen, and felt grateful when I was finished. I went after the others later, but this is the first Palahniuk that's crossed my path in awhile.

My scolding superego says I should be tackling ambitious, weighty fiction, but the world is messy, and sometimes everyone wants to take a look at people even more fucked up than themselves.

I loved the dialectic writing from the beginning. Every quotation I found made me happier than the last. The observational criticism of American culture was as cuttingly funny as it was accurate -- it summed up my own ambivalence about the issues but more cleverly and specifically than I have been able to voice for myself.

That said, I began to get an uneasy feeling toward the end... I'm on a train, enjoying company, listening to stories, taking in the scenery of divergent culture thought... and all this is good until you come to ask, where is it we're headed? A love story? Please don't let that be true. Really? Tenderness and redemption are not what I need at the end of a story like this.

So I am glad I listened to a voice like that... but something went wrong, wrong. I have to wonder if this is the ending Palahniuk really wanted. I'm glad he tried something different, and he did it well. I try not to look backwards, but fella, this ain't what we're coming to you for.

I really enjoyed the setup of this book. Only showing various forms of written communication between them was a good change, and Cecelia did it so well.

However, the end sort of let me down. I wouldn't really count this as a spoiler (how do you think the book ends), so I'm not marking this entry as such, but if you don't want even the slightest aspect of the end talked about, don't read any further...

So, you invest your time and effort into an over 400 page novel and you're waiting the entire time for one event and only one event and then it *finally* happens and you're so happy and then the author doesn't spend a single page on it. Needless to say, I just didn't really like that. She had done such a great job of building the story up that it was just a killer. Too bad.

Still, I would recommend reading it!

I picked this one up after I read Christopher Nolan was going to make a movie out of it. It's an amazingly visual read and works best not because of its skill - its writing style and skill is probably its weakest point - but because of the maddening story it tells.

It concerns two feuding magicians at the end of the 19th century, each trying to top the other with feats of seemingly impossible magic. A fun read that didn't take long, but also the kind that makes you want to read it again to make sure you catch all the hidden clues.

This was quite an interesting book indeed. It was so very different from the movie (as to be expected) that I found this book twice as intriguing as when I saw the film. It has also definitely made me more fascinated with the character of Alfred Borden. I wish he had been explored more in this book.

In this tale one reads about two magicians sniping at each other throughout, with interesting results. There is also a side plot in which a man is looking for his twin brother, in which I felt was sadly left hanging. All I could do was wonder what happened next, I wish there was something more from the author on that part of the story to make it feel complete, but there isn't.

It is labeled as Horror Fiction, but I did not really find any horror in it, besides what happened to the little boy. Otherwise there are just some creepy feeling parts in it, but nothing truly horrific.