Stranger Than Fiction

Last night I finished reading Non-Fiction by Chuck Palahniuk. The book is at it's best when Palahniuk writes about his own life and experiences which are sometimes very amusing: such as his experiences in Hollywood with the Fight Club movie, his attempts to use a lip enhancer to get the Brad Pitt look, and his experiences of walking around Seattle dressed as a dog. However they are also sometimes very poignant and moving: with his meditations on, among other things, life, death, writing and memory. I don't really know why the title was changed in the UK (in the US the book is entitled Stranger Than Fiction) because as far as I know there is no difference in the actual text.

I was also reading a couple of stories from the American Supernatural Tales collection. The first one I was reading was "The Events at Poroth Farm" by T.E.D. Klein in which a young college lecturer takes a room at a remote farmhouse in rural New Jersey in order to spend the Summer reading horror novels in preperation to teach a course in supernatural fiction, but soon finds himself getting some first-hand experience when he discovers a powerful and deadly force in the woods surrounding the farm. The story is mostly written as extracts from his diary, and so his thoughts about the events around him are constantly changing based on the books he's reading. I also read a story called "Night Surf" by Stephen King about a small group of teens hanging around a resort town after a lethal strain of flu has wiped out most of the population of Earth. It's kind of loosely related to King's novel The Stand. I have been really enjoying that short-story collection. Some of them have been really good.

It was a fairly dull day at work. The fire alarm went off and we all had to stand outside for about half an hour. It turned out that the reason was that the alarm wasn't working properly.