War as population control. A government conspiracy, a crazy good read.. I haven't read much Chuck, but this was very readable and if you've read Right Club, lots of references

Imagine a revolution that splits the country into new countries based on demographics. Pretty much what would happen if Facebook politics were fully enacted in real life.

This seems like a run of the mill copycat from other works. In this case, we have this fantasy of a young uprising to disrupt the country. The results are devastating and he expertly shows how bad it can get. However, in this political climate, the bad is outstripping our imagination and I would rather not imagine how bad it could get, we are already there.

Chuck Palahniuk writing is as good as ever. Only problem though, the way he fractured his text with multiple point of view made way for a lot of repetitions. It was easy to make predictions using these other point of views and killed the suspence. Also, with that many characters, it became difficult to actually care about them. Nice concept and idea thought.

Boring. Boring. Boring. I kept waiting for it to get interesting, in a way that actually made sense. But that did not occur. There are no chapters. There's no thread of a timeline AT ALL. There are barely any consistent characters, and I have thrown in the towel. Palahniuk's books have always been hit or miss for me, and I guess this one goes into the "miss" pile. Meh.

Maybe Palahniuk has lost his touch. I haven't read a book from him that I enjoyed since Rant back when I was in college. I'm not sure if I've grown out of his writing style or if his stories are just stagnant, but I didn't make it more than fifty pages into this one before I had to give up.

Chuck can do no wrong. His latest book is sure to please fans, both old and new. His wry and shocking criticisms of society and perfect handling of satire means you're in for a wild ride from start to finish.

Sorry...did not finish...or really even start it. I suppose my tastes are just way different than this author's...it was just a bit too odd for me. And I'm pretty odd.

I received this ARC from Netgalley for an honest review.
To start I loved Fight Club and watch the movie quite often. This feel like it takes place afterwards. The writing is jumbled and almost like the writer lost his fastball. I tried to like this but really couldn't do it.

Chuck Palahniuk isn't for everyone. If you enjoy the irreverent musings of John Waters or an hyper more fierce version of David Sedaris, you'll probably enjoy this book. If you frown upon words like fuck and cringe by the description of bowel movements as "poop rape" then this book isn't for you.

Adjustment Day is Palahniuk's warped version of what it would be like if white trash opiod users and black ghetto thugs and fabulous homosexuals came together to overthrow society as we know it and replace it with nation states similar to what you'd find in Orwell's 1984.

Palahniuk is at the top of his self-referential game. This book lovingly attacks everyone. There were parts that caused me to wince but message was worth the discomfort I felt reading this book. We're in a new era of social awareness but I feel that we still need authors like Chuck Palahniuk to remind us not to take ourselves so fucking serious.

America’s master of transgressive literary satire is back at it again.

Chuck Palahniuk’s new novel – his first in four years – is “Adjustment Day," a bleak look at the potential future implied by the logical (and not-so-logical) endpoints of our society’s current extremities. Filled with off-puttingly fascinating imagery, Palahniuk combines a belief in the power of the individual man with a nihilistic lack of faith in the judgment of mankind. It’s an anti-Randian treatise born of an extrapolation of Randian viewpoints, a libertarian fever dream of a dystopia populated by easily led men fueled by hatred and ignorance.

“Adjustment Day” also features Palahniuk’s standard well-honed prose and pitch-black humor, along with at least a few moments that’ll turn your stomach even as they force you to consider the heretofore unthinkable.

It’s an undefined time in America’s near future. The global community is teetering on the brink of another world war – this one driven by elderly politicians eager to thin the herd of young men and maintain the status quo. The U.S. is on the verge of reinstituting the draft, leaving thousands upon thousands of young men frustrated, angry and afraid. The blue-collared masses dream of turning white collars red. Ivory tower academics spout little more than grim platitudes that offer neither satisfaction nor sympathy.

Into this tumult comes the List.

The List simply appears one day, a collection of names on the internet. An open-sourced invitation is expressed – add the names of anyone you might consider an enemy of society. From there, people vote. If a name doesn’t receive a certain number of votes within a set timeframe, it disappears from the List. But some names – politicians, academics, figures from old media and new alike – rapidly climb the ranks.

Simultaneously, a strange book begins making the rounds. Passed from hand to hand, the book espouses a particular and peculiar philosophy, one whose impassioned militancy captures the imaginations of a certain subset of the disaffected – people who perceive their place in the world to be far less than what they truly deserve. People whose whispers of what’s to come are passed between those so overwhelmed with lies that they’ve chosen to create their own truth by whatever means necessary.

People who will welcome the brutal reality of Adjustment Day … and what comes after.

What makes Chuck Palahniuk such an effective writer is his ability to strain the bonds of credulity without snapping them. He stretches and shapes the worlds he creates, piling relatively minor alterations atop one another until we’re suddenly existing in an insane place at which we arrived through a seemingly sane series of steps. He never pushes too hard, but he also never stops pushing – the result is a distended and divided dystopia, a nightmarish landscape that still offers a horrifying hint of plausibility.

The narrative is a bit disjointed; Palahniuk is unafraid to leap from perspective to perspective, illustrating both the lead-up to and aftermath of Adjustment Day through a wide spectrum of characters. The quick cuts between storylines could have been a distraction, but the shattered-glass quality of the structural choices only serve to mirror the fractures borne out in the society we see play out on the pages.

“Adjustment Day” would seem to be Palahniuk’s reaction to the radical alterations to our own societal structures in recent years; while he has always been transgressive in his attitudes, this book is different. Whereas in past works, there’s been a feeling of remove, an observational quality to the stories he tells, this one feels angrier and more personal. Occasionally, it seems that the heat undermines the narrative a bit. More often, however, that rage serves to elevate the proceedings, providing an immediacy and urgency that we haven’t seen from Palahniuk for some time.

(There’s also a metatextual quality to the book; Palahniuk uses this new work to reflect (and pass judgment) on his own previous creations. Most of the time, that reflection/judgment is inferred, but he occasionally gets REALLY overt about it, in ways that are both insightful and darkly funny. This seems to serve as almost a satiric whetstone, a way to hone the blade so that it might cut even deeper.)

“Adjustment Day” isn’t a complete success. The cast of characters runs a bit too big; they occasionally run together a bit. There are a couple of spots where Palahniuk might be trying a little too hard to shock, but that’s par for the course – the guy is unafraid to take big swings. And when you swing big, well … sometimes you miss.

What Palahniuk has created here is a chilling and unsettling vision of our future, an exaggerated Darkest Timeline rendering of where our society’s current path might lead. It is garish and gross, a nihilistic stomach-punch of a book fueled by anger and gallows hilarity. “Adjustment Day” is evocative and provocative in equal measure – a novel very much of its place and time.

Ok. So this was not my favorite of Chuck's novels. "Lullaby" takes that honor. This was a much sharper satire. There were Fight Club references which was AWESOME. The subject matter of this novel is disturbing because it hits very close to home with what is happening today. He reveals how Adjustment Day came to be at the end and I think a lot of confusion could have been cleared up if this had been at least given away some along the way- however, the writing is still Chuck's and he writes better on his worst day than most do on their best. The events of this book read a bit like a very amped up Project Mayhem. I think people who love his writing will dig this. I think the easily offended will not. Thank you for the ARC! I love reading Chuck's work any chance I get!

I wanted to like this but it just wasn't fun for me- so much conflict. It was like reading the news of the day blown up and exaggerated into a satirical novel. Am sure others will value this more than I did. I DNF.

I had high hopes for this novel, perhaps too high, which is why I was more disappointed than rejuvenated by the novel. As satire, it was a bit over the top. I had a hard time keeping up with the countries and the characters because of the way they were presented in the novel. At times, my head felt like a pinball machine, and when the going was good, I was rocking and rolling with the story, but then, just like that, the game would be over, and at times I was relieved because of the amount of energy put forth and the realization I got nowhere. I did find the author's not-so-subtle humor making references to his earlier book "The Fight Club," and wondered about the readers who may not have read the book or seen the movie, imagining them wondering if they were missing out on a huge part of the novel (they weren't). At least this novel isn't called dystopian, but it certainly is a dark satire.

This is the first Palahniuk book I read (he's been on my wish list for years), so I can't compare it to the others. But I enjoyed it. The Adjustment Day of the title is a day of revolution in which the masses rise up against authority figures of all sorts: politicians, media, and academics. The whole thing is instigated by a book of cryptic sayings. A series of vignettes follow several characters in the lead-up to the big day and the social transformation that follows. It's odd that he doesn't fully reveal how Adjustment Day happened until the very end. It would have been less confusing to have shown more earlier (not to mention the fact that the flashbacks are not identified as such: that takes a while to figure out). Some of the renderings of the imagined nations are a bit over the top, even given the satiric intent. I'm thinking especially of the courtly language adopted by the residents of Caucasia. But it does all come together, and I think the discontinuities in the story telling are intentional ways to keep the reader off balance. I liked the book enough to finally get around to exploring some of the others.

I received an advance Kindle copy of the book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I really wanted to like this latest offering of Palahniuk's as I used to be a huge fan. I liked parts of this work, like the list of the least wanted that is posted on line, and if you receive enough votes your life is in jeopardy. Most of the top vote receivers seemed to be politicians, media personnel, and the inteligisia, which would probably be an accurate portrayal of the world we currently live in. He did make some excellent references to Fight Club and numerous other literary works which I also enjoyed.
I didn't enjoy the way he went about showing the disunited states that turned into three separate countries (caucasia, blacktopia, and gaysia), nor how and when he reveals where the individuals who are not part of any of those groups reside.
Overall I would recommend this to hardcore fans, but not to someone who is new. He's done better before.
Thank you to the publisher for providing me with this arc available through netgalley.

I am not the right reader for this book. I've enjoyed Palahniuk's work in the past, but this didn't work for me as either straight fiction or as satire. I found the timeline confusing and the characters ciphers and the whole book to be a bit of a mess. There were some interesting ideas, but it didn't cohere.

I’m a big Palahniuk fan, but don’t exactly know how I feel about this one. An interesting, absurd story, but would need to give it a second go to make sense of everything. Maybe reading as an ARC in ebook form without chapter heads added to my confusion...

Not for me at all. But I'm sure there are plenty out there that will love it.

Good story, entertaining! But it jumped between characters a bit much .