I got into a huge argument about Palahniuk's work last night, during which I basically had to explain every single objective reason why the guy totally sucks, of which there are about a million (the fact that all of his totally one dimensional characters are just narcissistic portraits of himself, his totally disingenuous details, his poor research which results in passages that literally make no sense, his utterly confused and incoherent "social observations," his comparisons of absolutely everything to excrement, I could go on and on). The bovine herds of business students swallowing Dan Brown's bullshit so they can have something to read on the plane make total sense to me, but how are people that I know are intelligent and interesting and actually capable of producing great art falling for this Palahniuk fool's obvious hokum? What's the fucking story here? Does an entire generation actually not know how to fucking read and is just choosing the bullshit artist that shamelessly angles for their demographic? I'm not even getting started on the pathetic regression of people over twenty years old reading books about a wizard school that were written for fifth graders. Seriously. WTF?