Pygmy - Chuck Palahniuk

This book features: rape (anal), graphic violence, scenes of psychological torture and brainwashing, as well as an almost continuous hate-spew against American culture, as told from the perspective of a supposedly thirteen-year-old agent from a totalitarian state. He, agent number 67, along with several other agents of the same supposed age are posing as exchange students in the same American community, all the while planning an "unspecified act of massive terrorism" (as read on the inside book cover).
Not suitable for younger readers; reader discretion is advised.
This book is divided into 36 chapters, presented as dispatches from agent number 67. Now, let me be honest: I gave up at chapter 14. This book was just too annoying.
Chuck Palahniuk can be a compelling author, as anyone who's read his memorable short story Guts can confirm: he can write so that you are pulled into the story, where you can't put down the book despite the graphic grossness of it - but really, you don't want to stop reading, because you want to know what happens next, and the narrator's style and tempo beautifully incite you to keep reading until the end.
However, in Pygmy, instead of making the story readable, he decided to really make it sound as though a spy (or terrorist, what the hell) with a somewhat shaky yet precise grasp of the English language narrated the story. During the first few "dispatches" this made for an interesting narrative device, but it quickly lost its appeal; essentially, you have to mentally translate the text, written in definitions-only English, into somewhat-comprehensible English. Here's a quick example of this novel's style, lifted from page 47:

Force compelled to sing how yearning for location on top arched spectrum of light wavelengths created by precipitate. Exact song expressed Judy Garland, woeful martyr, slaughtered pawn of capitalist entertainment machine combined pharmaceutical complex.

Translation: "We had to sing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow". It's the same song that Judy Garland, the actress, sang - before she died of drug overdose."You can still understand what the narrator's saying, but it gets mighty annoying after more than ten pages, and there's 240 pages' worth of it to slug through.
Apart from the sheer annoyance of it, this style also has the side-effect of making all the scenes of violence and turmoil seem grotesque and their impact is lessened on the reader.
Can you really blame me for giving up?

Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk

Everyone knows its first rule. But I will talk about Fight Club (how rebellious and suicidal of me!). This 218-page novel (if you count the afterword; it's only 208 pages if you don't) with a very annoyingly striped cover is full of quotable lines. Here are 21 such quotes, lifted from the first 21 chapters:

1. With a gun stuck in your mouth and the barrel of the fun between your teeth, you can only talk in vowels.
2. This was freedom. Losing all hope was freedom.
3. A single frame in a movie is on the screen for one-sixtieth of a second. Divide a second into sixty equal parts. That's how long the erection is. Towering four stories tall over the popcorn auditorium, slippery red and terrible, and no one sees it.
4. She isn't dying. Okay in that brainy brain-food philosophical way, we're all dying, but Marla isn't dying the way Chloe was dying.
5. Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.
6. You can swallow about a pint of blood before you're sick.
7. I am Joe's Clenching bowels.
8. HELLO! Look at me. HELLO! I am so ZEN. This is BLOOD. This is NOTHING. Hello. Everything is nothing, and it's so cool to be ENLIGHTENED. Like me.
9. Think about the monkeys shot into space.
10. The perfume, all those dead whales in the cuts in her hands, it stings.
11. the club is too loud to talk, so after a couple of drinks, everyone feels like the center of attention but completely cut off from participating with anyone else. You're the corpse in an English murder mystery.
12. My boss stands too close to my desk with his little smile, his lips together and stretched thin, his crotch at my elbow.
13. On the sticky paper next to my bare ass was a Polaroid picture of my foot that no one wanted.
14. I told the detective that it was the refrigerator that blew up the condo.
15. I punch myself, again.
16. Arson meets on Monday. Assault on Tuesday. Mischief meets on Wednesday. And Misinformation meets on Thursday. Organized Chaos. The Bureaucracy of Anarchy. You figure it out.
17. "Our culture has made us all the same. No one is truly white or black or rich, anymore. We all want the same. Individually, we are nothing."
18. We are God's middle children, according to Tyler Durden, with no special place in history and no special attention.
19. Our goal is the big red bags of liposuctioned fat we'll haul back to Paper Street and render and mix with lye and rosemary and sell back to the very people who paid to have it sucked out.
20. I have your license. I know who you are. I know where you live. I'm keeping your license, and I'm going to check on you
21. I stick my finger through the hole in my cheek and wiggle the finger around.

I haven't included quote from chapters 22-30 because they are spoiler-riffic. 

Frankly, I don't know what I think about this book. The first two-thirds of the story weren't that great, but then came a TWIST and I couldn't stop reading until the end. And that's pretty much the only thing that made this book memorable; apart from the whole soap-from-fat-from-liposuctions thing.