Ranking Chuck Palahniuk’s novels from Most Important to Least Important
Chuck Palahniuk is an important writer. Love him or hate him, he’s done more to bring reading to uninterested demographics than almost any other author. But how do his books rank?
I decided to take some time to (as) objectively (as possible) rank all of Chuck Palahniuk’s novels from Most Important to Least Important as a way to help hew readers find the right Palahniuk book.
What makes for an important book? It’s not necessarily a good story or well-written prose. I believe it’s a mixture of both, along with contextual relevancy, or “impact. For purposes of this list, I will be weighing the social impact of the book above any other metric.
Here’s the list
Socially relevant
- Fight Club (machismo and consumerism)
- Survivor (cult of celebrity)
- Invisible Monsters (cultural importance of and priority placed on beauty)
Maybe socially relevant
- Haunted (the reality TV obsession and “Truman Show Syndrome”)
- Pygmy (Xenophobia, terriorism)
Not socially relevant
- Rant
- Choke
- Lullaby
- Diary
- Snuff
- Tell-All
- Damned
The video is long, averaging about 1 minute per book (totaling about 12 minutes), but it’s a good enough primer, I think.
In addition to this one 12 minute video, I recorded a series of mini-reviews of each book. Check out any of the videos in the playlist below. At the end of each video, you’ll see a series of links that you can click to continue watching other Palahniuk book reviews.
I liked Snuff for some reason as well. It was like junk food for the brain. The ending is what I hated. It reminded me of the ending of Under The Dome by Stephen King. (Okay so not that bad but still.) I thought the writing in Fight Club was pretty shoddy, minimalism aside but the content deserved it’s following. Pretty good order in terms of importance though.