Choke - Chuck Palahniuk

"There's an opposite to deja vu. They call it jamais vu. It's when you meet the same people or visit places, again and again, but each time is the first. Everybody is always a stranger. Nothing is ever familiar." That is pretty much how I felt each time I picked up "Choke" from the bedside table, sometimes returning to it after more than a week or so and only slogging through it now and again when I could be bothered. Certainly, Palahniuk's fourth publication didn't captivate me from the off and nor did it do so at any other point in the book, allowing me to stop reading and return to it much later without a trace of thinking I'd ...  Read the complete review

Choke - a great book - Advantages: Chuck Palahniuk has once again used his clever writing style to create a story where you feel like youra part of it. - Disadvantages: None.

As a dyslexice, reading takes me forever. So when I do read a book, I live with it, literally for months, reading a page or two a day, living with the characters moment by moment. And I was strangely happy that Victor Mancini, the main narrator, was my virtual roomate for these last few weeks. The story - there isn't much to tell. It's about a guy who is anything but ordinary, and yet, you can empathise with him in your own way. You learn to realise that there is no such thing as ordinary, and everyone has their own strange habbits - maybe you could say that this what is ordinary. I don't want to go into the precise plot here - although ...  Read the complete review

Poor old Chuck. After the monumental success of the book, 'Fight Club', following David Fincher's film adaptation, the pressure's piled up on him to repeat the formula – to take another well-aimed swipe at modern culture, and make the reader think about their place in it. 'Survivor' was a great attack on the state of organised religion in America, 'Invisible Monsters' looked at the importance modern culture attaches to superficial appearance, and 'Fight Club' examined the position of males in modern society. 'Choke', however, is a far clumsier affair. The main message of the book is one that is overshadowed ...  Read the complete review