Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk - ★★★★★ - August 2025 - Contemporary

It was quite an experience reading Fight Club at my white collar job on a grainy PDF at the corner of my desktop. Pahlahnuik's writing is vivid, acerebic, lucid, strict, expressive. Electric and visceral, the two words I’d give it. I’m sure I’m not the first person to compare it to J.G Ballard, and ‘Crash’ in particular, but God I can’t help it. Add another to the counter instead of count originality against me.

Nor can I help but compare it to the film - I went into it expecting it to be either better or worse because that’s my metric for anything I watched before I read. And until this book, I never had any reason to give up the binary. Fight Club as a book was a wholly different experience all together, and I came away with more appreciation for the adaptation than before. In fact, maybe even a little scorn for it.

The book left me feeling uneasy and stagnant - like a puddle of sewage in a pothole, hot, rotting, and too obstinate to evaporate. The movie was a movie, serving up catharsis set to industrial trip-hop in flashes, bangs, fast cuts of simulated sex scenes, explosions, and celebrities. You watch the Narrator and Marla hold hands to a sensible indie pop song watching the towers exploding in front of them and come away satisfied, like you were holding their hands too. No hot, smelly, sewage, just electric and jittery from the excitement of such a well directed film, taking away from what I believe is the core of this story. The confusion, the hopelessness, the feeling of breathing stale air, the humanity. Decades have passed since the static we face was described, and the longer Fight Club feels relevant, the more it feels like the shock is coming, coming, coming but will never arrive.

Demian, Herman Hesse - ★★☆☆☆ - August 2025 - Literary, Classic ↓

"If it cannot break its egg's shell, a chick will die without being born. We are the chick. The world is our egg. If we don't crack the world's shell, we will die without being born. Smash the world's shell! For the revolution of the world!"

This is not a quote from the book, but from Revolutionary Girl Utena, a show that changed my life and referenced Demian extensively. Now I can see why.

I would call it one of my favourite reads of the year - so why the four star? Because I believe as bildungsroman it fails in some respects. Those who grow up alienated from their peers all face the same seduction - the idea that you are better than Them, the ones who turn their nose at you and can't seem to understand the largeness of life like you can. It's one I struggle with, one I've seen my loved ones struggle with. But the more we lean into it, the more we alienate ourselves. This book was a wonderful sort of catharsis for that idea, but how much does it have to say about that in actuality? Demian does, at one point, seem to give up partially. He spends his time away from home partying and drinking to conform to some extent, but he can’t stamp out that alienation from his heart. He can’t help but remember he’s in the egg, and only pretending to be the yellow of the yolk.

I enjoy Gnosticism and Jungian psychology, so I had fun with all how the book engaged with those ideas. The way Hesse describes that inner world and outer world speaks to an unspoken perception of the world I sometimes forget others share. Emil and Demian's relationship is a touch homoerotic and fascinating to follow over the years (and very very funny to see fulfilled through his mother of all characters, but I suppose that just makes sense.) In many, many, many respects, it's a very satisfying book. However it fails for me in propagating that seduction; There are more mature ways to go about it. In my head I couldn't help but compare Emil to Raskolnikov. If you've watched RGU: I find it very fitting that the Student Council should quote extensively from Demian, in ways I will go into another time. Maybe if I set out and make a blog just about RGU because that’s how much time it will probably take me.

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After stealing this review from my LibraryThing account, I realize I have more to say about this book than I did before. Perhaps it’s time for a reread already..

Siddhartha, Herman Hesse - ★★☆☆☆ - July 2025 - Literary, Classic

Alright, what kind of review could I even give about this? It was a bore. A straight fucking bore. A European enamored with the Orient’s twist on Buddhism. There is no insight it made that couldn’t be better found somewhere else. Sorry if that’s harsh, but that’s about as much value as it had to me. I could’ve spent that time reading the Ramayana, another textbook on Nagarjuna, my big, fat, abridged heavy hardback of the Bhagvad Gita I still haven’t gotten around to, listened to some Buddhist prayers, done literally anything else. Nor was Hesse’s writing captivating enough for me to give a toot.

As an airport read, it was a decent time waster. Short, sweet, and meaningless. I left it at the Portland Hostel’s newspaper section when I was done with a note saying it was free to take. Hope somebody enjoyed it better than me! I’m sure it would have some eye opening, world shattering, quality to someone less acquainted with these kinds of stories :p

August 2025

Carmilla, Sheridan Le Fanu - ★★★☆☆ - July 2025 - Horror, Classic ↓

VERY very fun, beautifully written, and no wonder that it is the mother of all Western vampire works. It's a short and exciting read I'd recommend to anyone. Even if Carmilla's attraction is based on her position as a predator, you can't help but enjoy the homosexuality of it. Makes the book in your head so much more fun than the one you're reading.

I plan to read Dracula later this year, and when I do I’ll come back and update this review with a comparison between the two.