I was so excited to pick up this book again. It is literally the book that made me want to be a writer - to look at pop culture with intelligence and humour.

I was a bit taken aback to realize how smug and insensitive Klosterman can come across. To 20-year-old me, it seemed transgressive and edgy but to almost 30-year-old me it feels silly to have put so much idolatry into a writer who is often just mean.

It's still a good read, it's still insightful and funny. Maybe it hasn't aged as well as I'd like or maybe I've just grown up a bit.

My copy was proudly purchased at Brown & Dickson Booksellers.

i thought “sex, drugs, and cocoa puffs” was a really insightful book and unlike anything i’ve ever read before. i could get down with the discussions about how the dixie chicks and van halen aren’t so different after all, and what i would do if i found out i slow danced in a dive bar with a convicted serial killer. while i can forgive the author for giving extensive play-by-plays of random basketball games i could not give a shit about, i cannot forgive him for not remembering who hosted “reading rainbow” on page 90. put some god damn respect on levar’s name, chuck!

if i wanted to hear an insufferable nerd talk for hours id just open my mouth

Klosterman's writing style is satirical, humorous, introspective and slightly sardonic. He's great at pointing out many absurdities within pop culture. It's easy to see how some people might be offended by his boldness but there's an underlying truth to every topic he writes about.
If you like books that analyze and dissect almost every facet of pop culture with a humorous twist then you'll probably like Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman.

Published in 2003, it's not holding up for 2017. I'm not sure it would hold up for 2003 as the author is all about the 80s. I was hoping for fun pop culture but it's so personal to,the author it wasn't relatable to most others, unless possibly you were a young awkward white male in the 80s.

No woman will ever satisfy me. I know that now, and I would never try to deny it. But this is actually okay, because I will never satisfy a woman, either.

Should I be writing such thoughts? Perhaps not. Perhaps it's a bad idea. I can definitely foresee a scenario where that first paragraph could come back to haunt me, especially if I somehow became marginally famous. If I become marginally famous, I will undoubtedly be interviewed by someone in the media, and the interviewer will inevitably ask, "Fifteen years ago, you wrote that no woman could ever satisfy you. Now that you've been married for almost five years, are those words still true?" And I will have to say, Oh, God no. Those were the words of an entirely different person -- a person whom I can't even relate to anymore. Honestly, I can't image an existence without _____. She satisfies me in ways that I never even considered. She saved my life, really.

Now, I will be lying. I won't really feel that way. But I'll certainly say those words, and I'll deliver them with the utmost sincerity, even though those sentiments will not be there. So then the interviewer will undoubtedly quote lines from this particular paragraph, thereby reminding me that I swore I would publicly deny my true feelings, and I'll chuckle and say, "Come on, Mr. Rose. That was a literary device. You know I never really believed that."

But here's the thing: I do believe that. It's the truth now, and it will be in the future. And while I'm not exactly happy about that truth, it doesn't make me sad, either. I know it's not my fault.

It's no one's fault, really. Or maybe it's everyone's fault. It should be everyone's fault, because it's everyone's problem. Well, okay...not everyone . Not boring people, and not the profoundly retarded. But whenever I meet dynamic, nonretarded Americans, I notice that they all seem to share a single unifying characteristic: the inability to experience the kind of mind-blowing, transcendent romantic relationship they perceive to be a normal part of living. And someone needs to take the fall for this. So instead of blaming no one for this (which is kind of cowardly) or blaming everyone (which is kind of meaningless), I'm going to blame John Cusack.

...

I remember taking a course in college called "Communication and Society," and my professor was obsessed by the belief that fairy tales like "Hansel and Gretel" and "Little Red Riding Hood" were evil. She said they were part of a latent social code that hoped to suppress women and minorities. At the time, I was mildly outraged that my tuition money was supporting this kind of crap; years later, I have come to recall those pseudo-savvy lectures as what I loved about college. But I still think they were probably wasteful, and here's why: Even if those theories are true, they're barely significant. "The Three Little Pigs" is not the story that is fucking people up. Stories like Say Anything are fucking people up. We don't need to worry about people unconsciously "absorbing" archaic secret messages when they're six years old; we need to worry about all the entertaining messages people are consciously accepting when they're twenty-six. They're the ones that get us, because they're the ones we try to turn into life. I mean, Christ: I wish I could believe that bozo in Coldplay when he tells me that stars are yellow. I miss that girl. I wish I was Lloyd Dobler. I don't want anybody to step on a piece of broken glass. I want fake love. But that's all I want, and that's why I can't have it.

wow. i read this in a blog and immediately went out and bought the book. i loved it all as much as i loved this.

If I met Chuck Klosterman, I would probably end up attempting to pick a fistfight with him. I say "attempting" because I don't know whether he hits girls. And I say "probably" because, for all I know, he may be far less infuriating in person than he is in print.

A lot of space in this book is aimed at mocking the pretensions of people who, I admit, sound an awful lot like me: decently-educated, irony-clad, pop-culture obsessed twentysomethings who deride popular country music and remember Jessie Spano's dramatic struggle with caffeine addiction.

Maybe I'm a little touchy about being mocked. Especially since Klosterman goes to great lengths to include plenty of self-mockery. I guess what I find grating in his form of judgment is the way his conceits are flouted as endearing quirks, while those he does not possess are somehow extrapolated into indications of deep character flaws -- assuming anyone so shallow could be anything "deep." I'm sorry if my intense dislike of Toby Keith makes me an unforgivable cultural elitist, but I think his jingoistic, truck-commercial-friendly output is unlistenable crap.

But back to getting into a fistfight with Chuck Klosterman. The thing is, I really enjoyed reading this book, despite intensely disagreeing with much of it. And perhaps because of it: I think I would be willing to trade in my imaginary fistfight for a solid argument over a few beers. It says something that this book made me evaluate my views, and, as a bonus, was so well-written that I not only actually read the chapters about sports, I enjoyed them. It scared me a little.

He's angry and bitter, and really f'ing funny. I don't know if it's deep. Probably about as deep as a belly-flop pool, but I do enjoy his brand of pop culture analysis. Maybe it's little more than mental gymnastics (fun to watch when it all goes down and quickly forgotten when you turn the channel), but he's a damn good gymnast. Sure, he's hypocritical and then calls himself out on his hypocrisy (a tactic I'm sure he'd give a ration of shit to anyone else for employing), and he makes a point of letting you know he probably hates everything you like and tells you why you're a d-bag for liking it, and makes eloquent, intelligent arguments for the crap he enjoys (The Real World, Pam Anderson blowjobs, Billy Joel, not in that order) showing you there's a depth to why he's taking the time to talk about what he likes in contrast to your particular love of punk which you should just shut the hell up about, but I just can't help loving the guy. And his rants. It's probably because I'm a critical asshole too.

Be forewarned, if you didn't grow up in the 80s and 90s, you'd better get yourself a pop culture reference guide because you'll get lost quick. If you're not sure what I'm talking about, here's a test. When I say "Saved By the Bell," if your response is a sigh tinged with a totally misplaced nostalgia for a completely forgettable show, then this book is for you. If you're thinking anything else, you might as well go back to reading Twilight.

Chuck Klosterman is now "The Ethicist" for the New York Times. Check him out. Ethics should always be this amusing.

I picked up Chuck Klosterman long after a former classmate raved about him. "Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs" was a really entertaining read, something that I curled into bed with on a regular basis. Klosterman is great when you want to laugh at American society, but you have to take him with a grain of salt as he criticizes everything from "Fake Love Music" (ie, Coldplay, which I have to agree with him about) to the Real World (which he is surprisingly obsessed with) to how everything in life can go back to the Celtics. Oh, and I have the very distinct impression that he's hyper-critical of a woman's appearance, by the fact that he rarely used "cute" or "pretty" as adjectives when describing females, and opted for "mildly attractive". I skimmed a couple of chapters here and there, but overall, a very smart and fun book.

This has not aged well! (Also, Klosterman is 30 in most of these essays; at one point I caught myself praying, please never let me date this guy.)

If you must, you may call it jealousy, but there is no getting around the fact that if someone had read my essays during college, and then paid me to keep writing those essays, then I could (would) have been Chuck Klosterman. [1] But seriously: I feel like I could have written all of these essays (possibly better) if only someone had come along and said: Hey, you've got the right kind of sarcastic wit and you know how to stitch together a bunch of quasi-esoteric references... can you bang together a couple of 5,000 word essays on pop culture subjects? Only problem is that I'd probably have peaked at like 25. [2]

Anyway: this is Chuck Klosterman. Basically, he is the older brother that I never had--the older brother of whom I am extremely jealous. He gets all the girls. (Even if he can't keep them.) He smokes all the best weed. (Even if he can't handle it.) He goes to all the best concerts. (Even if he doesn't enjoy them.) He's seen every episode of every show, went to every game of every team, heard every record by every band, read every book by every author, taken every class by every prof, and remembered every detail about all of them. [3] Thus is he the smartest kid in the room--even if he still goes around claiming to be an idiot. And despite all that, I can see right through all of his bullshit shenanigans.

And trust me: there are some bullshit shenanigans going on here.

Klosterman is lazy. Seriously: how can you (in good conscience) open an essay ("Every Dog Must Have His Every Day, Every Drunk Must Have His Drink") with a not-at-all-oblique reference to September 11th and then not tie that back in to the overall theme? When we get to the end of "Every Dog Must...", all he got was Billy Joel-Billy Joel-Billy Joel and the eternal struggle between Cool and Great. But he opens with "nineteen unsmiling people from the Middle East" and then he just leaves it hanging there, never to crash back into the rest of the narrative. Lazy, sloppy work. [4]

But for as lazy as Klosterman is, he's sharp. He "gets it". And how do I know that he "gets it"? Because he is harping on "that celebrity thing"--the same way that William Gibson talks about celebrity in n  Idorun; the same way that Bruce Sterling talks about celebrity in n  Holy Firen; and (to a lesser extend) the way that Neal Stephenson talks about celebrity (and/or pop culture's collision with itself?) in n  Snow Crashn. Yes; Chuck understands it. The bizarre world of the successful (?) cover band in "Appetite for Replication". The meta-conflicts of the simulated life of simulated people in the simulated world of "The Sims" in "Billy Sim". The exegesis of Pamela Anderson-vs-Marilyn Monroe-as-the-best possible-sex symbol-for-her-time in "Ten Seconds to Love". The circular conundrum imposed by MTV's "The Real World" and the full explication of that subject in "What Happens When People Stop Being Polite". And that's all in the first 85 pages. Yes indeed; he may be lazy and sloppy, but this is Chuck Klosterman at his best. [5]

Anyway: Chuck Klosterman's Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: just as easy to love as it is to hate.

---

[1] Only seven years later?

[2] So... replace "jealousy" with "schadenfreude"?

[3] Despite smoking all the best weed.

[4] And/but that's OK? because he writes like some sort of proto-blogger? or like a college student at a fancy liberal arts school that never bothered to graduate? And/but maybe that's a whole big essay in and of itself? About the proto-blogger style? about the liberal artsy interest? about the elevation of pop culture and equalizing it with all of your fancy-pants schooling subject matter?

[5] ALSO: Chuck is really at his best when he's writing about sports. Because it's funny when nerds write about sports.

With a disturbingly thorough knowledge of pop culture and an almost effortless ability to spin brilliant prose out of unlikely subject matter, Klosterman attacks every aspect of postmodern America: reality television, the false, unbalanced nature of When Harry Met Sally, and the media, among other seamlessly interwoven topics. He presents his essays as if they were tracks on a CD and elaborates on his experiences, which include everything between interviewing musical icons as well a brief history on the cereal industry. Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs is ostensibly about entertainment, politics, music journalism, and the reality that is the world we live in. The focus ultimately lies on the realization Klosterman has, in the moments before he falls asleep: "In and of itself, nothing really matters. What matters is that nothing is ever 'in and of itself.'