I do not know how Chuck Klosterman gets me to read about obscure rock and roll references and make me laugh and enjoy it. I think it's because he's not smug and too serious about his observations or his line of work. Like, if he was the Anthony Bourdain of music critics I would have to punch myself in the face, but he's so charming and relatable and it is so easy to read his writing.

First half is a tour de force... Bogs down a bit in the Midwest (doesn't everything?), but still a page turner with the only bad part is the restaurants he chooses.... DC and he's looking for an Applebee's.... Criminal.

Klosterman has a voice like no other. I've never read a book that made me feel so intellectually stimulated. I instantly wanted to tell everyone I knew to read this book so that we could have intellectual conversations about life, death, love. The book is supposed to be about Chuck's journey to find out what makes a rock star a legend when they die early. Not much of the book is dedicated to this topic. It's more of the back-story of the book, not necessarily the thesis of it. There were times where I got lost in his music references and how they related to things in his life. (I don't know tons about the lives of the members of KISS or Lynyrd Skynyrd) However this didn't take too much away from my appreciation of the book. If anything it made me want to learn more about these bands and their members so that I can have an even deeper appreciation for the book.

I cannot express how highly I recommend this book.

As I wrote in my review of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, Klosterman is the poster child for postmodern American writers. His knowledge and usage of pop culture in his writing should resonate with me. Unfortunately, he makes a lot of general statements as if they are fact rather than opinion, and many of his allusions are too obscure, as if the more obscure the reference, the smarter he seems. Unlike Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs which was a collection of unrelated essays, Killing Yourself to Live is a singular work. Klosterman is instructed by his editors at Spin to travel across the country by car visiting the places where tragedies related to musicians occurred (beginning at the hotel where Sid Vicious killed Nancy Spungen, and moving to places like the venue where the Great White conflagration happened and ending in Seattle where Kurt Cobain shot himself). He documents his road trip by describing how the sites made him feel, and including conversations he has with fellow pilgrims and how they feel. Klosterman also interweaves some of his thoughts and feelings from several of his real-life relationships (a woman he is currently dating, and several from his past) into his narrative on what his journey is teaching him about life (and love) and death. Overall, it’s a much more focused and compelling read than Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs because the subject matter is deeper, and his usage of his relationships adds a level of humanity and emotion to the narrative. On the other hand, most of his writing tics still annoyed me – like the inclusion of random tangents of his opinion. For example, he spends two pages trying to convince the reader that Radiohead’s Kid A album was a foretelling of 9/11. There’s also too much self-awareness and awareness of his self-awareness – like a scene where he has an imaginary conversation with his current girlfriend and two former ones, and the imaginary voices remind him he is having this imaginary conversation. Screw you, Dave Eggers, for affecting modern nonfiction writing in this way. Fans of music and fans of Klosterman’s writing style will enjoy this, I think. For others, it’s a quick and mostly solid read with minor annoyances. Recommended.

Smarmy hipster irony with some amusing anecdotes mixed in.

Fun listening to a local boy and hearing about his "tour!"

This is where it all comes together: Chuck's madness over pop minutiae, his purposeful oversharing and the crossroads of the two. If you're in, you're all in on this one. And if you can't stomach it, you should probably step away from the vehicle.

Chuck starts this book off by noting that some of the characters from his real life story have held onto their actual names and some have been given an alias. At some point, I came up with the crazy idea that I might actually know who one of the pseudonyms were IRL and confronted her with her code name. She admitted that it was in fact her. In that moment, just after I had completed all six of his existing books over a six month period, I felt like I must be the biggest Chuck Klosterman fan there was right then.

So I at-tweeted him about the binge, never heard back, and was silently devastated. If I ever write my own memoirs about desperately trying to connect to my idols, it may very well start there.

I bought this book on vacation as I was excited to find another Klosterman book in the wild after having read and enjoyed his book on The Nineties. I was disappointed to find that this title was nearly 20 years old, but gave it a shot. Man, I hope he has re-read his work lately and realizes how cringeworthy some of his prose is. Talk about a guy trying real hard to be edgy. This book needs to stay in the past. DNF

Made it to page 54 before I felt like I just might throw this book into a dumpster. I can't understand someone who is fascinated and in awe of an author who wrote about what music she'd listen to if she ever was brave enough to slit her wrists and bleed to death to, and yet finds no majesty, beauty or history in seeing the Washington Monument (or any monument in DC) or the Grand Canyon. He finds these "things" pointless, but music-to-suicide-to worth writing an entire chapter about.

No thanks.

Chuck Klosterman is like my guilty pleasure. He took a story he was writing for a magazine article and stretched it out into a 270 page book! I think I like him because he writes; how my mind works....one thing reminds him of something else, which leads him to something else and next thing you know he's off talking about something entirely different but relates it all together. The overall plot is O.K....but that's not really the point. I have a few favorite parts... One of them being how "Kid A" is the official soundtrack of 9/11 and if you listen to it in it's entirety (as I am right now) it documents that days events through the music, even know that album came out in 2000. My other favorite part is his theory on how everyone goes through a similar "Led Zeppelin phase" in their life (1998-1999 for me) and that every straight man born after the year 1958 has at least one point in his life when he believes Led Zeppelin is the only good band that ever existed, and no other rock group can ever generate this same experience. Pure genius!

I found this book to be somewhat self involved and irrelevant. If someone paid me exorbitant amounts of money to travel around visiting the sites of rockstars' deaths, I could probably produce something at least as amusing as this.

Chuck Klosterman is one of those audiophile dorks, for whom every single minute aspect of life relates back to some obscure alternative song. Also...I hate Kiss and AC/DC, so reading a five page diatribe about how each of his past girlfriends relates to a specific Kiss solo album is NOT my idea of a good time, and is kind of a retarded analogy in the first place.

I will say, though, that I liked and was amused by analysis of Led Zeppelin and its importance as a band. Basically he says that every boy (what about the ladies, chuck?) experiences Led Zeppelin in the same way and goes through a period where they listen to nothing BUT Led Zeppelin and are wholeheartedly convinces that Led Zeppelin is the best, most meaningful, rockinest band in the world. I wholeheartedly agree with this. And what's funny is that my Led Zeppelin phase didn't occur until I was like 25 years old!

On the whole though, this was definitely a dude book, and not a great one at that.

Wow, as a compulsive consumer of pop culture (and regurgitator of trivia), I wanted so badly to like this book (and did, for very brief moments). However, Klosterman is so vile and obnoxious in his shallow, lazy brand of self-mythologizing I almost couldn't stand it. Nevermind the fact that there was no thesis to this book, the sin I could not forgive was how self-servingly and uninterestingly he mined each and every one of his past relationships (or casual lays) for book fodder. Throughout this "book" Klosterman gives off the stench of a college freshman desperate to bolster his word count by making banal, pretentious observations about the objects currently in his field of vision.