...and Mr. Klosterman and I officially fall in love. If you're going to date me, you should read this book. If you want to learn how to smoke marijuana resin using parts of your car, you should read this. Don't read this book if you have epilepsy.

I'm really glad that I went through this in this particular phase of my life. It mainly revolves around punk rock and death but it also has several intertwined romance plots too, which constitute equal interests. I also enjoyed it as a travel memoir, meeting people and contemplating death and music as we've always strived to understand it with our own romantic frustrations and yet so romantic. I don't agree about everything Chuck says, but I believe that he has a fascinating and erudite perspective of whatever he talks about. And this work consists of a plethora of criticism about labels and quite interesting films too. Overall, I believe Chuck to be a fine rock critic, although I don't always agree with his ratings.

Well, I was in a heavy metal phase but now I feel like diverting to Audioslave and Alice in Chains.

Abandoning. Instead of being about fame, death, and music, this repulsive guy rambles on about his numerous girlfriends. Who cares? Not me. Stopped reading.

Overall I found it okay, at times when he gets into details of some of the music or the music as it relates to the women he loved it becomes too much for me.

So many thoughts about this very, very Gen-X document of travel and longing. At times I smiled at Klosterman's evocations of the simple beauty of the most mundane things. At times I wanted to snap his glasses in half and shove him in the nearest locker (which I probably couldn't do, because while his external persona is nerdier than mine, he actually is a former jock). To be honest, it was so many thoughts I wrote a whole thing about it.

If you care: click dat shit.

https://subjectslashobject.blogspot.c...

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.

This sounded pretty good. The author goes on a road trip in search of actual places that famous rock musicians died. He is a writer for Spin Magazine. If this was actually what the book was about I think it would have been interesting but he barely touches on his destinations and instead reverts to whining about the lost loves of his life and everything else that sucks in his life. He also frequently gives his opinion about music and musicians, most of whom I have never heard of. He tries to be humorous but it falls flat for me because so much of what he writes about is depressing or whining. Interesting concept for a book. I just think it could have been done better.

I barely got through this. The author is too full of himself. Constantly on about every woman he fucked or how the woman he wanted did something so horrible that he didn't want to be her friend, but he cant tell the reader what it is, you just have to trust his douchey opinion.

Get this book away from me.

Diga lo que diga Lucy, ha sido justo el hecho de no hallarme ante un libro que alimente mi morbosidad, o me dote de una información, medianamente exhaustiva, sobre fama/música /muertes trágicas, lo que ha hecho que me sintiera plenamente a gusto con esta historia. Klosterman me habla de sí mismo, de su percepción de las cosas, me habla como un tipo viejo, cuando no lo es, pero todo encaja en su mente :amor/muerte/música, todo se mezcla y se apoya. Evidentemente no puede evitar, como muchos de nosotros (creo que todos tenemos una banda sonora que acompaña nuestra vida ), que los albumes que escucha y venera, pongan música a todo lo que vive, e incluso, dirijan parte de ella.
Una novela que es una road movie, íntima, sin tapujos, coloquial, humana.

As a longtime admirer of Chuck Klosterman’s writing on pop music and culture, it pains me to report that his latest book, Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story, is a dismal, shoddy piece of work. The premise is promising: Klosterman sets out on a cross-country road trip to visit all of the sites of rock ’n’ roll’s long, rich history of death. It seems a brilliant idea — Klosterman’s combination of irreverence and curiosity make him the perfect candidate to unseat the holy-pilgrimage seriousness (and pathos) of most writing on rock ’n’ roll tragedy.

It doesn’t take long for the project to turn sour. Here’s the problem: Klosterman is used to skating by on the wit and originality of his own personal world-view; in his last collection, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, his observations on MTV, pornography, video games, and so on, emerged from a perspective that led him to some surprising conclusions. There was a sense of play, of intellectual gamesmanship, that was fresh and engaging. In Killing Yourself, however, he’s become self-reflexive to the point where he can no longer discriminate between what is valuable and what is piffle; it’s all self-narrative. If he’s looking at something, he thinks his reaction to it — how it affects him — automatically matters simply because it’s him, Chuck Klosterman, looking at it. He has become too lazy and uninterested to make any serious effort at thinking or observing and analyzing what a specific site or incident might mean, and falls back on relaying what it means to him, at that moment.

The most devastating element here is the incomprehensible decision to let Klosterman devote much of the book to pseudo-Hornby writhing about the three (!) women with whom he’s currently involved (that is, either sleeping with or wanting to sleep with). Aside from being, at times, downright creepy, it’s both lazy and irrelevant: as smart and funny and interesting as Chuck Klosterman is, I couldn’t really give two shits about his love life. His self-absorption on this count goes so far as to include a chapter-long conversation between the three women and himself that takes place entirely in his head. What’s sad is that he seems to realize this; the book closes with an actual, real-world conversation between the author and one of his female colleagues at Spin, who urges him not to become “the female Elizabeth Wurtzel.” At this point, one tends to agree wholeheartedly with the criticism, and Klosterman’s only retort is to tell her that “her disdain can only be voiced if I do the opposite of what you suggest.” It’s pre-emptive critical damage control. It’s embarrassing.

It is unsettling to see how turning Klosterman loose on such a promising theme brings out his worst instincts as a writer, because his feature pieces for Spin are often brilliant. A perfect example was his reporting on the Rock Cruise, one of those only-in-America phenomena wherein 40-year-old couples pay to hear REO Speedwagon and Styx perform on a boat. It is hard to imagine a riper opportunity for superiority and ridicule, yet Klosterman never condescends to these people — working-class Midwesterners who are paying money to see over-the-hill versions of the two of the most reviled bands in rock history — and in the end lends both the bands and fans an odd kind of dignity. It is frustrating to know that the author is capable of such insights and then to slog through 235 pages of crap that wouldn’t make it onto a Weezer B-side. One can only hope Killing Yourself was just something he needed to get out of his system.

From THE L MAGAZINE, July 20 2005

This doesn’t hold up the way it did when reading it in 2005, or 2007, or 2011. But four stars for the college nostalgia of being 20 and endlessly talking about this over cheap beers and VH1 classic marathons and pretending like we knew anything at all. Jazz wolf.

"I tell you what’s really ridiculous—going into a bookstore and there’s all these books about yourself. In a way, it feels like you’re already dead..."
—Thom Yorke

Well, this one was disappointing... I love reading books about music and musicians, and the description of this one sounded interesting enough. Unfortunately, the book was a disjointed mess.

Author Charles John Klosterman is an American writer and essayist whose work focuses on American popular culture. He has been a columnist for Esquire and ESPN.com.

n  Chuck Klosterman:n
n  n

The book begins with some very strange writing. Missing a proper introduction; the writing early on was both way too long, as well as very poorly done. Klosterman talks about a woman he is in love with that's not reciprocal for much more time than it's worth. WTF?! What does this have to do with the story here? This would be a harbinger of the rest of the writing that was to follow...

Klosterman mentions the murder of Nancy Spungen by Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols in the Chelsea Hotel early on, before jumping into a long diatribe about his interests in two different women. WTF (again).

Unfortunately, things don't get better as the book goes along. There is lots of rambling writing, with little to no concern for cohesion, and/or clarity. Most of the writing here is pretty much the inner monologue of the author for the duration. The reader is treated to all his neurotic thoughts, as well as contemplations of the women that he'd like to sleep with. Stuff that is completely detached from the subject matter of the book. A terrible presentation...

Finally, the book contains little to no actual useful information. The different sites he travels to are mentioned almost as afterthoughts, and then it's back to his never-ending rambling inner monologue, and irrelevant interactions with the people he meets along the way.

***********************

Despite being excited to start this one, it ended up being a colossal disappointment. The writing here is absolutely abysmal.
This left me seriously wondering how the hell this book was published in the first place. It reads like the incoherent ramblings of a borderline street preacher...
If it were any longer, I would have put it down. Remind me to never read anything else by this author ever again.
I rarely ever rate books 1 star, but this one is not deserving of any better...
1 star, and off to the return bin with this hot mess.