“Diary” by Chuck Palahniuk

It’s important to note that I formulated my opinion of this book without the knowledge that it was so universally acclaimed by book critics. This review has nothing to do with their opinions, nor my opinions of their opinions, and is solely based on the merit of the book. “Just for the record“, I think they’re all out of their minds.

I thought it was about cattle farming. Boy was I wrong!….. Ahhh, who am I kidding? That probably woud’ve been a better story, anyway.

Of the five Chuck Palahniuk books I’ve read, “Diary” is undoubtably the least engrossing, and the most difficult to “get”, at least for the first fifty pages or so. Most of that difficulty comes from the fact that the “voice” switches between 3rd, 2nd, and 1st person perspectives at seemingly random times. For the first few chapters the reader is entirely confused. It’s not until later that we’re clued in to the reasoning of the writing style, and even then, it’s still a little hard to figure out why. The book is written as the “coma diary” of Misty Marie Wilmot, an account of the events of her life, for her husband, laying in a coma after his failed suicide attempt. She writes from a detatched 3rd person point of view for most of it, discussing “Misty“, but saying “you” or “I” to re-iterate that her husband is responsible for things being the way they are, or when taking the blame herself, respectively.

Of course, without the clarification that this is indeed her talking about herself, the reader is left with a jumble of “I”s, “you”s, and “Misty/Peter”s, and totally distracted, but knowing the way the author writes, I’m sure that’s how it was intended. Effective, yet at the same time offputting for first-time “Chuck” readers. A common theme in his books is that he hides who characters really are, through tricks of language, and unfortunately, that payoff in this book is both early and underwhelming.

The bigger problem with the story, though, is that there doesn’t seem to be enough plot elements to warrant the length of the book (even though it is pretty short). The story revolves around Misty of course, who met her husband Peter at art school (the details of their courtship are a separate subplot thrown in every few chapters or so, “just in case” Peter doesn’t remember it when he wakes up… conveniently for us), got married, and moved in with his well-to-do family on the tourist trap Waytansea Island. Strangely enough, even though there’s a large influx of non-natives during the summer, somehow all of the rich island people have run out of money and are angry/resentful at/of the tourists. Their sole purpose is to reclaim their life of luxury and exclusivity. And Misty, they say, through her art, will be the one to do it for them.

The main action of the story involves Misty’s discovery of walled-up rooms inside houses that Peter built for the “Summer People”. Inside the rooms he has scrawled incoherent warnings on the wall in large print with spraypaint. The whole time that she is investigating, she is being manipulated by the island inhabitants, including her 13-year-old daughter, into basically becoming immobile and drugged-up, so that she can channel the spirit of a painter who’s been dead for 100 years.

The problem is that the mystery of the walled-up rooms doesn’t go anywhere. Once you read the first message, you realize that he probably didn’t want to be a part of the manipulation, and that’s why he tried to kill himself. There’s no point in dwelling on these rooms at all, yet there are countless chapters devoted to it. It feels like it was just tacked on to lengthen the story, and provide us with those trademark “Chuck” factoids that he fills his books with, namely construction superstitions.

His foreshadowing in this book is also pretty terrible, in that instead of hinting that things aren’t as they seem, he pretty much has the narrator discover that they aren’t, and through her, the reader as well, but not do anything about it. For example, early on, Misty asks around about the cause of Peter’s father’s death, which is met with different responses from different people. Of course she, and we, realize that they are lying to her, but when he appears at the end of the book, alive and well, it seems that we’re expected to be surprised that he is alive. Not only that, but there’s no explanation given as to the reason they faked his death in the first place.

Of course, as with all of the author’s other books, this one is filled to the brim with useless tidbits of knowledge about a few specific subjects, including facial musculature, graphology, the artwork patterns on fine China, and the methods used to make early paints. Unfortunately these factoids fail to be as interesting as how to make soap/explosives, the environmental impact of new species entering a habitat, or even how to clean impossible stains .

The book’s biggest detriment is that there’s no sense of the unexpected about to happen. The only reason I kept reading was just to see if I was right in my guess about the rest of the story.

I can’t in good conscience recommend this book to anyone but die-hard fans of the author. You’d be much better reading Survivor, Lullabye, Fight Club, or Invisible Monsters… probably in that order too.

[rate 1]

This book has too many extraneous stories that don’t really resolve well enough. The characters aren’t likable in the least, even the character we’re supposed to be rooting for. The writing style is confusing at first and once explained, just tedious. The foreshadowing is too blatant, and there aren’t the traditional surprises that make his books interesting. The factiods quite possibly are the most boring of all of his books, even beating out the complete overkill of the items in Survivor. On the whole though, it’s a lot more of a pleasant read than most of the stuff we had to read in 9th and 11th grade of high school, namely “The Good Earth”, “Jane Eyre”, “The Scarlett Letter”, and “The Red Badge of Courage”, all considered classics.

[…] May 17th, 2006 Nate They kinda look like the Azores. With the one-year anniversary of my college graduation taking place on May 16th, I figured I’d write something about my college experience, something that the few of you who read this that went to Ithaca would be able to relate to and feel nostalgic about. I decided early however, that I wasn’t just going to do a review on my college experience, as that would seem too “Dear Diary” for me. I wasn’t going to complain about the “food” in the Campus Center Dining hall ad nauseum, because I’m sure that’s been done to death… and most people move off campus or to the Circle Apartments and don’t deal with the “Double C” for their last year or two. I wasn’t going to complain about the curriculum, mostly because those issues have been dealt with, starting with the class after me, and they’re much better off for it. Lastly, I wasn’t going to offer warm and fuzzy memories of how great all my friends were, the teachers were, the facilities were, and my extracurricular opportunities and the semester in L.A. were. What else could there be to complain about/praise? Well if you haven’t guessed by reading the title, I’ll put it bluntly: The method of registering for classes that we used. Let me preface this all by saying that before computers were used, I have absolutely no idea how a class registration system could be fair. I can assume that people wrote down on a piece of paper the classes that they needed, and the classes that they wanted and turned it in and waited for the results… sort’ve like in high school, where your guidance counselor spent 25 minutes convincing you to take a bunch of extra classes that you didn’t come in wanting, (of course, taking some time out in the middle of the meeting to take a call from his real estate side-job) only to find that when your schedule arrived weeks later, you weren’t enrolled in any of the classes anyway. Maybe that was just me. But by handing in forms that said what you wanted your schedule to look like, how were students to be guaranteed that those were the classes they were going to get? What if classes were filled? What if new sections that students were switched into conflicted with other classes the student wanted to take? How did the administration decide what order to take individual registrations? Obviously by credit amount, but what about students who were at the same grade level, with the same amount of credits? In any case, it seems like as an incoming freshman, they had just recently implemented a computerized system by which all the students would register for their next semester’s classes, presumably to solve all of these problems. The program, “The Degree Navigator”, itself wasn’t that terribly hard to understand. There were multiple tabs to take you to different views. The most important three (as i can’t remember what the other two were) were the class selection tab, the schedule tab, (i’m sure they were standard on registration software for everyone at every school), and the strange “island” view, which conveniently showed you what your different requirements were (as in communications, non-comm, liberal arts [a phrase whose meaning still eludes me], and the various requirements within each major) shown in the form of colorful islands floating on a bright blue background. When you rolled your mouse over them, it showed what you had completed and what you were still required to take. I believe that those might’ve been shown in pie chart form, but I could be wrong. You would go to the registrar’s website, and there would be a link to register for classes. Clicking on it would open the application, as sort’ve an advanced pop-up window with forms. This was the degree navigator. You’d go over to the selection tab, type the course number into the spot for it, and hit enter. The course description and section times would come up, and you were allowed to add the classes to your schedule. You would then have to go over to the side where all the selected classes were and individually finalize the registration for each class. If there were time conflicts between sections, the program would tell you, but in an unhelpful and very computer-like way, by course number. I wouldn’t expect the program to give me the course name, so I’m not really complaining about that. In fact, once you used the program the first time, you realized it was actually a pretty easy application to navigate around… provided you could understand the whole “island” thing, which was more for telling you what classes you had done and what you needed to do, rather than for registering. The problem was in the actual method by which the whole student body was meant to register. It happened during the course of a week and a half every semester. A different group registered every day, starting with students in the honors program (i don’t know that i ever met any of them), then freshmen, then seniors (yes freshmen got to register before seniors), juniors, and sophomores… of course all of those were divided up into first and second semester students, via credits. So each day of registering saw students within about a 12-18 credit window signing up at the same time. Not too huge of a problem. We weren’t a terribly large school, so it wasn’t like there were more than a few thousand people registering per day. There was no breakdown however, within each day, and so you had a couple thousand people trying to get on the system at the exact same time. That shouldn’t’ve been a problem… after all, there’s at least four times that amount that use the internet at one time, any other time of day or year. The problem however, was that our residential computer network was incredibly unstable to begin with (blamed by the people in charge on the proliferation of computer viruses on the network…. cause I’m sure that other schools don’t have to deal with viruses, and they manage to be fully operational), complete with fits of shutting down at the most inopportune times (a subject for an entirely different review, and someone more knowledgeable in the area of computer networking than I am). That coupled with the fact that everyone was going to the same site and trying to open the same web-based application proved not the best way to handle things. Rather than giving us a program that we could install on our computers, bundled with the initial netware software that we had to use to be able to use the network, and the antivirus stuff, they figured that opening it from the registrar site would be the most viable option. Of course they were completely wrong. It was an epic disaster. The residential network just couldn’t handle the sheer number of people attempting to log on (if you managed to open the program prior to the start time you could open the application, just not log on to actually register). And of course rather than just telling us that we couldn’t be logged on because something somewhere along the line was too busy, it just kept trying to log everyone on. Of course, in the best possible scenario of it not working, the program froze. In the worst, it caused people’s computers to crash, freeze, and quite possibly be thrown out of windows in fits of frustration. In fact, only serving to exacerbate things more was the registration time. Because classes started at 8 a.m., and the people in charge wanted to make sure that everyone had the same opportunity to get to classes before the seats were filled, the registration window opened at the extremely early 7 a.m. That’s right. Imagine thousands of frustrated college students pissed off at the idea of being shut out of classes and screwed over by the system, dealing with a program that isn’t going to work correctly, having to reboot their computer numerous times, and on top of that, having to get up before 7. At least we had the opportunity to register from the comfort of our own computers, if we could ever get this demon program to operate correctly. The worst year that I remember was the second semester of my freshman year, registering for sophomore year. It was early April probably, and it was also probably really cold and rainy outside. I just remember sitting at my computer, my comforter draped over me, waiting, complaining to neighbors across the hall and next door. I sat there, knowing I was going to miss my 8 a.m. class. Everyone that I had recently added to my AIM buddy list was in the same boat as I was. People had away messages up about how much they hated the degree navigator, how they wished it would die, and how they were so tired and pissed off in general. Having just gone through a phase of creating new screennames and harrassing people with them, I saw this as an opportunity to pose as the Degree Navigator through IM, asking people why they hated me so much. I was THAT bored and pissed off. People who managed to log on were offering to register other people for classes via phone, but others were skeptical about giving out their registration password for fear that their schedule might be tampered with. It wasn’t until 10:15 that I was able to log on and register, making me late for my 10:25 class. Of course, I got the bottom of the barrel when it came to classes that weren’t course requirements. I can’t remember what I had, but I’m pretty sure that it wasn’t anywhere near what I had in mind the night before. The following semesters were much of the same, but not taking as long, as more people in my class (year) decided to move off campus, or use the computer labs, which were on a different network, to do their registration. Knowing that I’d probably have to wait in line to use a computer for as long as it would actually take me to register from my room, and not wanting to get dressed at 6:50, and instead go back to bed when I was done, I decided for next few semesters to just ride out the storm in my room. Unlike the people in New Orleans, my decision wasn’t really all that detrimental to my health. Sure it took forever to get logged on, but none of the future attempts took more than an hour. Still, the away messages were up, the people were complaining across the hall, and there was a feeling of bonding. Without a popular sports team to rally behind (save the one game a year where the entire school went crazy for the football team, mostly because it was an excuse to get drunk at 8 a.m.), or, fortunately, some tragic event that effected everyone at the school (save the September 11th stuff), the universal hatred of the degree navigator registration system brought everyone together. In fact, I’d wager that had somebody decided to sell T-shirts that said “I survived Registration ’02”, they’d probably make enough money for the school to fix the actual problem. To prove my point even more, I typed in “Degree Navigator”+sucks in google, and these are the first two pages it came up with: here and here. Of course, what this 7 a.m. east coast egistration time meant for me when I was in L.A. was that I had to register at 4 a.m. Pacific Time….and we didn’t have the internet in our apartment. I’m not sure how we got around that, but I know I didn’t walk 3 blocks at 4 a.m. to register at the Ithaca L.A. student center. The Degree Navigator was a good system in theory, but they say the same thing about communism. There were bigger problems that everyone pretty much blamed on the Navigator, giving it a bad rap. The Degree Navigator program itself gets three and a half stars. It was mostly easy to navigate, and I’m sure it was a bit more fair and, yes, less of a hassle, than however they did it before it was done by computer. It was pretty much the scapegoat for the entire student body’s issues with registration, and served to bring them together with something unified to complain about. The actual process of class registration gets one star for not having the foresight to see, especially after it happened numerous times before, that the network would get log-jammed by allowing so many people on at once; for not allowing people to get into classes that they needed; and for intruding on the sleep of thousands of students who schedule their earliest class at 11 a.m. for a reason. […]

One response to ““Diary” by Chuck Palahniuk”

Empty Bookshelf Reviews » The Degree Navigator Class Registration System says:

May 17, 2006 at 12:34 am

[…] May 17th, 2006 Nate They kinda look like the Azores. With the one-year anniversary of my college graduation taking place on May 16th, I figured I’d write something about my college experience, something that the few of you who read this that went to Ithaca would be able to relate to and feel nostalgic about. I decided early however, that I wasn’t just going to do a review on my college experience, as that would seem too “Dear Diary” for me. I wasn’t going to complain about the “food” in the Campus Center Dining hall ad nauseum, because I’m sure that’s been done to death… and most people move off campus or to the Circle Apartments and don’t deal with the “Double C” for their last year or two. I wasn’t going to complain about the curriculum, mostly because those issues have been dealt with, starting with the class after me, and they’re much better off for it. Lastly, I wasn’t going to offer warm and fuzzy memories of how great all my friends were, the teachers were, the facilities were, and my extracurricular opportunities and the semester in L.A. were. What else could there be to complain about/praise? Well if you haven’t guessed by reading the title, I’ll put it bluntly: The method of registering for classes that we used. Let me preface this all by saying that before computers were used, I have absolutely no idea how a class registration system could be fair. I can assume that people wrote down on a piece of paper the classes that they needed, and the classes that they wanted and turned it in and waited for the results… sort’ve like in high school, where your guidance counselor spent 25 minutes convincing you to take a bunch of extra classes that you didn’t come in wanting, (of course, taking some time out in the middle of the meeting to take a call from his real estate side-job) only to find that when your schedule arrived weeks later, you weren’t enrolled in any of the classes anyway. Maybe that was just me. But by handing in forms that said what you wanted your schedule to look like, how were students to be guaranteed that those were the classes they were going to get? What if classes were filled? What if new sections that students were switched into conflicted with other classes the student wanted to take? How did the administration decide what order to take individual registrations? Obviously by credit amount, but what about students who were at the same grade level, with the same amount of credits? In any case, it seems like as an incoming freshman, they had just recently implemented a computerized system by which all the students would register for their next semester’s classes, presumably to solve all of these problems. The program, “The Degree Navigator”, itself wasn’t that terribly hard to understand. There were multiple tabs to take you to different views. The most important three (as i can’t remember what the other two were) were the class selection tab, the schedule tab, (i’m sure they were standard on registration software for everyone at every school), and the strange “island” view, which conveniently showed you what your different requirements were (as in communications, non-comm, liberal arts [a phrase whose meaning still eludes me], and the various requirements within each major) shown in the form of colorful islands floating on a bright blue background. When you rolled your mouse over them, it showed what you had completed and what you were still required to take. I believe that those might’ve been shown in pie chart form, but I could be wrong. You would go to the registrar’s website, and there would be a link to register for classes. Clicking on it would open the application, as sort’ve an advanced pop-up window with forms. This was the degree navigator. You’d go over to the selection tab, type the course number into the spot for it, and hit enter. The course description and section times would come up, and you were allowed to add the classes to your schedule. You would then have to go over to the side where all the selected classes were and individually finalize the registration for each class. If there were time conflicts between sections, the program would tell you, but in an unhelpful and very computer-like way, by course number. I wouldn’t expect the program to give me the course name, so I’m not really complaining about that. In fact, once you used the program the first time, you realized it was actually a pretty easy application to navigate around… provided you could understand the whole “island” thing, which was more for telling you what classes you had done and what you needed to do, rather than for registering. The problem was in the actual method by which the whole student body was meant to register. It happened during the course of a week and a half every semester. A different group registered every day, starting with students in the honors program (i don’t know that i ever met any of them), then freshmen, then seniors (yes freshmen got to register before seniors), juniors, and sophomores… of course all of those were divided up into first and second semester students, via credits. So each day of registering saw students within about a 12-18 credit window signing up at the same time. Not too huge of a problem. We weren’t a terribly large school, so it wasn’t like there were more than a few thousand people registering per day. There was no breakdown however, within each day, and so you had a couple thousand people trying to get on the system at the exact same time. That shouldn’t’ve been a problem… after all, there’s at least four times that amount that use the internet at one time, any other time of day or year. The problem however, was that our residential computer network was incredibly unstable to begin with (blamed by the people in charge on the proliferation of computer viruses on the network…. cause I’m sure that other schools don’t have to deal with viruses, and they manage to be fully operational), complete with fits of shutting down at the most inopportune times (a subject for an entirely different review, and someone more knowledgeable in the area of computer networking than I am). That coupled with the fact that everyone was going to the same site and trying to open the same web-based application proved not the best way to handle things. Rather than giving us a program that we could install on our computers, bundled with the initial netware software that we had to use to be able to use the network, and the antivirus stuff, they figured that opening it from the registrar site would be the most viable option. Of course they were completely wrong. It was an epic disaster. The residential network just couldn’t handle the sheer number of people attempting to log on (if you managed to open the program prior to the start time you could open the application, just not log on to actually register). And of course rather than just telling us that we couldn’t be logged on because something somewhere along the line was too busy, it just kept trying to log everyone on. Of course, in the best possible scenario of it not working, the program froze. In the worst, it caused people’s computers to crash, freeze, and quite possibly be thrown out of windows in fits of frustration. In fact, only serving to exacerbate things more was the registration time. Because classes started at 8 a.m., and the people in charge wanted to make sure that everyone had the same opportunity to get to classes before the seats were filled, the registration window opened at the extremely early 7 a.m. That’s right. Imagine thousands of frustrated college students pissed off at the idea of being shut out of classes and screwed over by the system, dealing with a program that isn’t going to work correctly, having to reboot their computer numerous times, and on top of that, having to get up before 7. At least we had the opportunity to register from the comfort of our own computers, if we could ever get this demon program to operate correctly. The worst year that I remember was the second semester of my freshman year, registering for sophomore year. It was early April probably, and it was also probably really cold and rainy outside. I just remember sitting at my computer, my comforter draped over me, waiting, complaining to neighbors across the hall and next door. I sat there, knowing I was going to miss my 8 a.m. class. Everyone that I had recently added to my AIM buddy list was in the same boat as I was. People had away messages up about how much they hated the degree navigator, how they wished it would die, and how they were so tired and pissed off in general. Having just gone through a phase of creating new screennames and harrassing people with them, I saw this as an opportunity to pose as the Degree Navigator through IM, asking people why they hated me so much. I was THAT bored and pissed off. People who managed to log on were offering to register other people for classes via phone, but others were skeptical about giving out their registration password for fear that their schedule might be tampered with. It wasn’t until 10:15 that I was able to log on and register, making me late for my 10:25 class. Of course, I got the bottom of the barrel when it came to classes that weren’t course requirements. I can’t remember what I had, but I’m pretty sure that it wasn’t anywhere near what I had in mind the night before. The following semesters were much of the same, but not taking as long, as more people in my class (year) decided to move off campus, or use the computer labs, which were on a different network, to do their registration. Knowing that I’d probably have to wait in line to use a computer for as long as it would actually take me to register from my room, and not wanting to get dressed at 6:50, and instead go back to bed when I was done, I decided for next few semesters to just ride out the storm in my room. Unlike the people in New Orleans, my decision wasn’t really all that detrimental to my health. Sure it took forever to get logged on, but none of the future attempts took more than an hour. Still, the away messages were up, the people were complaining across the hall, and there was a feeling of bonding. Without a popular sports team to rally behind (save the one game a year where the entire school went crazy for the football team, mostly because it was an excuse to get drunk at 8 a.m.), or, fortunately, some tragic event that effected everyone at the school (save the September 11th stuff), the universal hatred of the degree navigator registration system brought everyone together. In fact, I’d wager that had somebody decided to sell T-shirts that said “I survived Registration ’02”, they’d probably make enough money for the school to fix the actual problem. To prove my point even more, I typed in “Degree Navigator”+sucks in google, and these are the first two pages it came up with: here and here. Of course, what this 7 a.m. east coast egistration time meant for me when I was in L.A. was that I had to register at 4 a.m. Pacific Time….and we didn’t have the internet in our apartment. I’m not sure how we got around that, but I know I didn’t walk 3 blocks at 4 a.m. to register at the Ithaca L.A. student center. The Degree Navigator was a good system in theory, but they say the same thing about communism. There were bigger problems that everyone pretty much blamed on the Navigator, giving it a bad rap. The Degree Navigator program itself gets three and a half stars. It was mostly easy to navigate, and I’m sure it was a bit more fair and, yes, less of a hassle, than however they did it before it was done by computer. It was pretty much the scapegoat for the entire student body’s issues with registration, and served to bring them together with something unified to complain about. The actual process of class registration gets one star for not having the foresight to see, especially after it happened numerous times before, that the network would get log-jammed by allowing so many people on at once; for not allowing people to get into classes that they needed; and for intruding on the sleep of thousands of students who schedule their earliest class at 11 a.m. for a reason. […]

“Diary” by Chuck Palahniuk

Share this:

One response to ““Diary” by Chuck Palahniuk”

Leave a Reply