Beautiful You seems to be Chuck Palahniuk’'s response to and commentary on the popularity of 50 Shades of Grey series and the proliferation of commercial erotica born from that series. But Beautiful You never rises to the deep social analysis that Palahniuk’s early stuff does. Beautiful You remains simply clever and superficial, becoming more a book belonging to the commercial erotica genre rather than a commentary on it. But still, it's a damn fun read.
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Chuck Palahniuk is an important writer. Love him or hate him, he’s done more to bring reading to uninterested demographics than almost any other author. But how do his books rank? I decided to take some time to (as) objectively (as possible) rank all of Chuck Palahniuk’s novels from Most Important to Least Important as a way to help hew readers find the right Palahniuk book. What makes for an important book? It’s not necessarily a good story or well-written prose. I believe it’s a mixture of both, along with contextual relevancy, or “impact. For purposes of this list, I will be weighing the social impact of the book above any other metric. Here’s the list Socially relevant Fight Club (machismo and consumerism) Survivor (cult of celebrity) Invisible Monsters (cultural importance of and priority placed on beauty) Maybe socially relevant Haunted (the reality TV obsession and “Truman Show Syndrome”) Pygmy…