toilettereads: January 2015

Look! A totally late upload! What else is new?

Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk was the very first Palahniuk book I ever saw/took notice of at bookstores way back when. This was sometime in my high school life, and one of the things that really drew me towards it even all those years ago was the very mention of a porn star. (I've probably always been a secret pervy sage.) I finally got around to it, and as I mentioned in my video, it really made me wonder if anyone managed to contract an STD while on set. I mean, this was one woman's goal of having 600 sexual acts caught on film. Surely having that many sexual relations in such a short period of time (the entirety of the whole filming process that takes place in the book is just the span of a day) could lead to something, right? (Spoiler alert: DEATH.)

I liked how this was told in different perspectives -- about three of four, three of which were the perspectives of men who were participating in the whole 600 project. What really blew me away was the plot twist at the end; you think the first plot twist was the climax of the story and the rest of the book was just a matter of tying some loose ends here and there, but lo and behold, there's even a bigger plot twist that totally debunks the former changes everything altogether. I totally didn't see it coming.

Vampires in the Lemon Grove and Other Stories by Karen Russell was something I brought with me on an out of town trip because I wanted a light read on the beach. Thing is, a lot of the short stories in this book were a little twisted -- sometimes kooky -- where the very last story got totally dark and somewhat eerie. That last story used bullying as a central element, and that kind of got me in the gut. There was a sense of cruelty that seemed so unfair yet so real, and anybody who ever got bullied in their lives could probably relate.

Besides the books photographed above, I also wrapped up The Secret Series by Pseudonymous Bosch as part of my reads for January. Between Snuff and Vampires, I began reading Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (hence my wanting to read something 'light' for the aforementioned beach trip), but as of this post, I have yet to even get halfway into the book. I keep on putting it down and never reading it continuously for some reason. I really hope to finish it before my birthday, at least.