Hello...

Hello. Allow me to introduce myself: I am Jose (Apa), and in recently talking to the owner of this blog (Andy), I expressed to him how I was thinking of starting my own blog. He graciously invited me to just join his, so here I am. Forgive me as I become acquanted with this system and learn how to "blog." As a new contributor, I would like to start a weekly (though it will probably end up being a monthly) post on what I'm reading. I know this sounds a bit self-absorbed, but isn't blogging in general such an activity?
Of course, I would love to hear people's responses and opinions on the books being discussed. I offer a review of Chuck Palahniuk's latest work as the first installment of hopefully many. This is a review I wrote for a new magazine (called Backslash, I believe) that is going to be published through FIU, UM, and FAMU (though I'm not sure about that last university). I will post the details as they are made available to me.

Here is the review:
Chuck Palahniuk. Rant: An Oral Biography

Chuck Palahniuk has a knack for presenting characters one hates to love (think Tyler Durden in Fight Club, charismatic and boisterous but with fascist tendencies). In Rant: An Oral Biography, Buster “Rant” Casey is the kid you remember from elementary school who was always dirty and smelled of urine and old Tampons, but he fascinated you because he flustered the teacher.
The reader learns—through the ranting (pun fully intended) of family, friends, acquaintances, doctors, and psychologist— Rant’s story which involves rabies, the tooth fairy, a trained, heightened sense of smell and taste, a game involving people crashing their cars into one another, virtual reality implanted in your brain a la Matrix, time travel, and possibly incest.
In one of the tamer scenes of the novel, the reader learns how Rant got his name from a Halloween prank he pulls off in which he makes all the school children of his little town vomit. Remember those Halloween parties in which you were blindfolded, and then told to put your hand into a bowl of “brains” and “eyes”? Take out the quotation marks, and you have kids ranting after touching cow eyeballs and pig intestines.
Tension is added in the novel through the use of a myriad of contradictory anecdotes detailing not only Rant’s life but also the setting of the story: a pseudo-apocalyptic future in which over-population has led to laws which relegate people to “Day-timers” and “Night-timers,” and in which the government has an Orwellian eye on their citizens.
The anecdotes are entertaining, and leave the reader wondering what is real and what is artifice. Until the final fourth of the book when Palahniuk tries to explain all the obscure time travel and rabies he's deftly introduced rather than leave the reader in the dark, and let the reader use his own imagination. It is like getting food poisoning. You enjoy the meal while you eat it, but then you are left (excuse the pun) ranting afterwards. Palahniuk should stay away from the pseudo-sci-fi and stick to the pseudo Gothic he is much more talented at.