pairs: ‘eating animals’ and ‘survivor.’

I usually like to read more than one book at a time. But reading more than one book at a time can be tricky. Ideally, I like my books to be:

• Different enough from one another that I can enjoy them separately.
• Similar enough that the reading of one supplements the reading of the other.

It’s like matching a wine to a steak. (You can decide which book is the wine and which is the steak).


Survivor is about a guy raised in a religious cult. Eating Animals is about… you know, eating animals.

Jonathan Safran Foer examines vegetarianism morally, economically, and environmentally. The book has gotten a lot of press (he is Jonathan Safran Foer, after all). One of the book’s focuses is on the transition between animal and commercial product. Let’s face it. Something alive turns into something you buy. What comes in between is essentially “the meat industry.”

Now, Palahniuk. If you’ve ever read a Palahniuk book (Fight Club, Choke, Rant), you know that Palahniuk’s world is divided thusly:

• Group number 1: Those who use the free-market, capitalist system to lie, cheat, steal, and generally fuck over…
• Group number 2: Those whose ignorance confines them to being lied to, cheated, stolen from, and generally fucked over.
• And group number 3: Those whose intelligence allows them to see the dynamic of these previous two groups, but who do not wish to participate in either the fucking-over or the being-fucked-over. Those who feel confined by this dynamic, who feel trapped inside it, who occasionally fall victim to it and hate themselves for it. Palahniuk’s main characters fall into this group.

And Survivor is a lot of stories, but mostly, it is the story of a man who has made the transition between living creature and trademarked consumer product. Tender Branson spends his whole life being trained, raised, packaged, and prepared for mass consumption. In fact, Tender is even fed the same pharmaceuticals and steroids as the cattle and pigs in Eating Animals. He is the meat that Foer writes about. And both Foer and Palahniuk plead their audience to transcend this consumer culture.

By the way. Palahniuk wrote Survivor in 1999. It’s about a plane hijacking. You can’t write about that now. He may have written the last significant literary work of the pre-9/11 era. And Foer wrote Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, one of the first significant literary works about the post-9/11 world. Did Foer take over where Palahniuk left off as the off-beat literary hero of the decade? Will Foer last into the next decade?

So try reading these at the same time. You may not believe in humanity when you’re done. Just warning you.