A tale of hedonism from Bret Easton Ellis, filled with sex and drugs.Bret Easton Ellis is of my biggest influences as an author and this is probably the Bret Easton Ellis novel that most influenced Drug Gang. It contains similar themes and social commentary. To quote from the book itself, “I think we've all lost some sort of feeling.” This postmodern masterwork gives great insight into the possible impact and outcomes of a nihilistic mindset.

At the beginning of the year, I decided that in 2020 I would devote some time to working through my sprawling to-read list, whether that meant actually reading the books or throwing them out. A second-hand copy of The Rules of Attraction had been sitting on my shelves for years, and I rather thought I might have missed the moment to read and/or enjoy it. Perhaps rather embarrassingly, though, I loved it. It's nihilistic, sure, but also SO well observed, hyper-quotable, and parts of it had me in

''He likes him. He likes her. I think she likes someone else, probably me. That’s all. No logic.'' Hella horny college kids. Also huge cunts, huge narcissists. The movie, which i adore and own on DVD, is way better.Love the weird BEE *Bret Easton Ellis* universe. ''-I was in that class too.-I didn't ever see u in there.-That's why i failed it.'' Bruh, such a mood.Fuuuuck, i miss uni. Yes granted i went to class and then after like 1-2hours left to go to a cafe but still. Online classes ain'

This book may have sounded contrived to some, but to me it was exactly the way I remember being and feeling in college. The dorm, cafeteria and party scenes are brilliant and so are the fast travel sections. When I recently read The Sorrows of Young Mike, it felt like a sequel because the characters were also nihilistic college students, horny and self-involved. It, along with The Rules of Attraction, touches on similar issues that hardly affect the main characters, as they are busy thinking abo...

At first glance, this book is pointless. It's an endless loop of drugs, sex, and parties. It has no plot, it begins and ends in the middle of a sentence, there are too many characters strewn about, too many labels, too many songs, too many places. You finish the book and for a moment you think 'wait - what? That's it?' but you realize yes, that is, in fact, 'it'. The apathy Ellis invokes in his readers, shows in his characters, is still masterfully done. He breezes past topics like suicide and a...

This was my introduction into the world of Bret Easton Ellis, and I fell hopelessly in love.I couldn't believe that someone could put together a written work, which not only emanates the characters hyper-sexed-over-zealous-self-conscious-unaware-searching-for-love-not-knowing sadness, but uses language to reinforce its themes. It would seem confusing, but at my first read, it was what I was feeling at that moment (minus the drugs, those came later). Rules of Attraction, at its base, is a novel a...

The following is a true story.I was staying over at the boy's house. We were post-coital and all of a sudden he remembered he had to go to a friend's house and party with him for four hours. I opted to wait for him in his bedroom. This was uncommon because whatever, it was just sex, we didn't wait around for each other. But I was in between places, so I didn't have much of a choice. I went down to the kitchen and found The Rules of Attraction on the stove. I opened it up in the middle while eati...

”So I stand against the wall, listen to REM, finish the beer, get more, keep my eye on the Freshman girl. Then some other girl, Deidre I think her name is, black spiked hair that already looks dated and trendy, black lipstick, black fingernail polish, black kneesocks, black shoes, nice tits, okay body, Senior, comes over and she’s wearing a black halter top even though it’s like forty below in the room and she’s drunk and coughing like she has T.B., swigging Scotch. I’ve seen her stealing Dante

& so I thought that after college this would be less impressionable & a tad less impressive. Boy was I wrong. I am still completely enraptured by this novel in which characters DON’T change (breaking 1 of the main cardinal rules of all literature—to make protagonists experience change—Ellis is intrepid). The details in this are perfect and absolutely hilarious--80's encapsulated brilliantly. You end up rooting for the sleaziest of antagonists—nobody in Camden deserves redemption and most actions...

I've never really been a fan of multiple narrators in a novel. Switching character voices every 20-30 pages or so wouldn't have been so bad, but here it happens sometimes in as little as 2-3. To me it felt driving along a stretch of road that had traffic lights every 100 metres. I just want to get moving! There was no flow here. Pity, as my last outing with Bret Easton Ellis was simply superb. There was rarely a dull moment in Glamorama, and the shift in story about halfway through was one of th...

Posted at HeradasWhenever I’m the mood for fiction about first world problems, unloved rich kids and the fucked up lives they lead, I reach for something by Bret Easton Ellis. I get on a serious kick for this kind of stuff sometimes. Transgressive fiction, I’ve heard it called. Maybe it’s soothing to my soul to think that an abundance of money doesn’t necessarily alleviate our problems. Maybe I get a heavy slathering of schadenfreude by reading representations of the most fortunate among us endu...

Ellis is one of those authors that seems to grow in stature as time marches on. i see him on so many Favorite Author lists and i just have to roll my eyes a bit. personally, he'll always be the author i laughed at on a regular basis: hilariously pretentious and embarrassingly convinced that pretension equals depth. American Psycho? sorry, the film version was a better portrait of capitalist consumerism and had the intelligence to re-route the author's misogyny so that it existed solely within th...

3.5 StarsThe Rules of Attraction is one of those stories that makes you feel slightly uneasy while reading it. It had the feel of both A Clockwork Orange and Trainspotting in the sense that it is so over the top and risqué. The Rules of Attraction is unlike anything that I have ever read before.I had never read anything from Bret Easton Ellis before, although American Psycho has been sitting on my shelf for quite some time now. I came across The Rules of Attraction at a local thrift shop and I r...

My friend lent me this book and I was super excited because we're trying this new thing where we lend each other a book to read every month... and this was the first one of our new little reading adventure. I was bored. Insanely bored. It felt like someone was literally yelling gibberish so fast into my ear that I almost couldn't understand them at all.I tried to enjoy this. I did. I read 50 pages the first day and then I just decided to read the rest of it in one sitting because I knew if I put...

'The Rules of Attraction' is a dark satire that follows the lives of hedonistic and unsympathetic college students. Centred around an unusual love triangle between its three protagonists; the novel is a multi-perspective tale that depicts different forms of desperation and abrasiveness. Packed with page-turning scandal and sharp narration, the book is a strangely intoxicating read that moves from sensational events to bizarre tragedies. Although it's crammed with plenty of action and scandal, th...

This book made me so glad to be 30…The blurb says that this book is about the “death of romance”… But I feel this is a little bit more complicated than that. Sure “The Rules of Attraction” follows four unspeakably awful undergrads as they get tangled up in the most fucked up love-triangle I’ve ever read. As they agonize childishly over their various experiences, disappointments and mistakes, it’s hard to feel for them: none of them have any moral compass, maturity, honesty or self-awareness. The...

People who did not like this book simply did not understand it. While this book has the ability to stand on it's on, the real genius is how it acts ad a platform that allows ellis's characters (from all other works) to interact with one another outside the narcissism that confines their own stories. Those who complain that this book lacks plot or character growth, have failed to ask why that is. This book is an introspective account, told in first person narrative, from various (mainly three) pe...

50th book of 2020.This is probably the worst time to read Ellis, as he's so damn depressing. Disaffection is the perfect word for his books, the way you feel when you're reading them. (I must say, also, how great is this cover? Not sure why it is, but I think it's great.)Despite this, by Goodreads standards, has the same rating as Less Than Zero, American Psycho and Lunar Park, I think this has been the best Ellis yet. Let me try to explain. American Psycho is just Less Than Zero on some serious...

This is the most depressing, nasty book I've read in a long time. I read it all in one go last night, since I have a hard time not finishing books once I start them, but I couldn't stand the thought of having to come back to it. There may be some literary merit to the book that I can't appreciate it because I'm so repulsed by the characters, but I rather doubt it. The book certainly captures the complete lack of affect and total self-absorption of the characters, as well as the compulsive, endle...

One of the best books on insight. The setting makes this book even more pleasurable-a college campus in the 80s. We've all contemplated simple questions like "Does my best friend secretly hate me?" or "Does my boyfriend think about someone else when he's sleeping with me?". This book makes your insides squirm with embarrassment in the most hilarious form. There's so many great things about this book-the ending, the graphic sex scenes and how Victor is really a boring piece of shit. You never get...