Well, I'm testing my limits of tolerance. This one found my limit and I just chose to not keep listening to it. Maybe I'm getting too old, maybe it is another generation's irreverence I can't take, maybe it was just too black for me, but I realized I had nothing to gain by forcing myself to read this to the end. When the character's motivating phrase is "What would Jesus NOT do" it can lead to some pretty lousy life choices. I didn't care what happened to the character - I doubt he got redeemed, so let him continue his fictitious life story without my being witness to it.
The narrator of the story is a med school drop-out who earns a living working at a historical theme park and to earn extra cash for his mother's upkeep in a home (OK, I guess that is a bit redeeming) he pretends to choke in restaurants, lets people save him, and then continues correspondence with them. Since they feel responsible for him after saving his life, they send him money. He has a loser of a friend who collects rocks. I don't know why that particular obsession really got to me. It was basically harmless, could be funny, but it drove me nuts to hear about all the parts of the house that were taken over by rocks. Plus these two are sex addicts. I don't mind occasional explicit sexual content in books, but this was just not fun or appealing, just kind of gross.
I turned to my favorite book review source - Amazon (blasphemy) and learned that this is just the way Paluhniuk writes. Publisher's Weekly commented that the audio book was read by the author himself in an off beat way, appropriate to the book. But the best reviews were from average readers. One warned to stay away from this book if you are at all squeamish. Another just said it must be a guy book, as she didn't like it. Maybe that's it. I saw this book at some friend's vacation condo. Maybe it was the guy reading it. Or maybe I wouldn't enjoy reading a drugs and sex book from my era anymore either.
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