I've avoided reading Chuck Klosterman for the same reason I avoid punching babies in the face. It just seemed too easy. Did I really need to read another weary Gen Xer obsessing over the minutia of Pop Culture and then obsess over why they're obessing. Were Nick Hornby, Sara Vowell, David Sedaris, Nathin Rabin, and countless others truly not up to the task? Was there truly such a void in my soul calling out for another pretentious post modernist to come and suck all the fun out of everything? Had I not learned my lesson from the testicle shriveling anti-prose waking nightmare that was "Nobody Belongs Here More Then You?"

No, I was not particularly looking forward to jumping on the back of another Hipster Sacred Cow. I feared another book of clever oh so affected but oh so uneffected prose might actually kill me. And the fact that I could still hear the publishers orgasm after receiving a title as marketable as Sex Death And Cocoa Puffs did nothing to allay my fears.

It turns out that my fear was unfounded. While Klosterman is too pretentious, post modern and overly analytical he is also fun, in possession of a mean sense of self deprecative wit and keen sense of the absurd. While some of the essays on SDACP do take the fine art of navel gazing to unheard of extremes (Pamela Anderson article I'm looking at you). Others manage to dissect modern culture with a surprisingly sharp and dare I say even level headed style.

Whether it's formulating a surprisingly believable hypothesis that Breakfast cereal commercials are responsible for the existence of hipsters, explaining why soccer will never be popular, or examining the paradox of "authenticity" in country music Klosterman serves as a witty guide through the madness of modern life.

Klosterman comes through very clearly and personally in this collection of essays, which is perhaps why everyone's low ratings include a desire to punch the guy in the face. Personally, I loved it. Maybe I didn't love him - many of the essays sound like rants from a bitter, defensively un-pretentious hipster - but those rants were funny, well-written, and spoke to me. Yes, I'm in the right age/experience range. Maybe this is not the book for everyone, but it worked for me.

DNF. I tried, but things are too hard right now to read books that make you this unhappy

You might think after reading my review of Klosterman's book that I didn't like it. But you'd be missing the point.

That being that it isn't so much that I thought much of it was trite or, indeed, so wrong I wanted to call Klosterman and argue with him or maybe even challenge him to a duel or a cage match. For if you look under many of the deliberately contrarian statements peppered throughout the book, you will find some gems. Including some surprisingly sensible arguments. For example: The cultural subtext that will always prohibit soccer from catching on in America; the observation that a working tribute band, if fully successful, will cease to effectively exist as a tribute band (and why bands choose to be tribute bands rather than do their own thing--surprisingly logical from an audience member's standpoint); Or that the Sims is a game that allows you to live a fake life so that you can forget you are living your own.

But rather, the book is billed as 'low culture manifesto' but falls short of that moniker. Rather, it's the encapsulation of the stoned conversations thirty-somethings had with each other in college--now in print and technicolor. And with the constant (and often pointless) footnotes, Klosterman seems to striving for a David Foster Wallace sort of feel when in fact Wallace's essays are so vastly superior to these that doing so only makes Klosterman's shortcomings even more apparent.

That being said, as a thirty-something who had many, many drunken coversations about these same subjects, I enjoyed the book, even when I took issue with it. So now you're probably thinking I liked the book. And I did. Somewhat. But that's not the point.

It's not that I didn't like this book... Okay, that's exactly what it is. But the real issue I had with Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs is this: I've either had every conversation in this book (which I enjoyed more than these essay versions of them) or I've walked away from the conversation because it didn't interest me in the slightest. I can name at least ten people I know who could have written this book (give or take an article or two), and probably could have written it better (including the person whose choice this book is for my book club).

I didn't dislike it all, though. It was amusing in parts. It's just that I didn't find it to be wonderfully clever even though it was clearly trying very hard to be.

I could talk a lot about why I didn't like this book for little reasons, but on the whole, I think my distaste for it was rooted in the fact that I couldn't simply read it at my leisure, picking it up and putting it down to read a single article and then switch to something else, because we're reading this for book club and thus my reading has a deadline. Had I been able to just skip an article (such as the mind-numbing article on basketball) or stop reading one (like when he made repetitive references to Sigur Ros and Devo as though they were symbols of uniqueness, only to make them ordinary by constantly referencing them) so I could move on to something else or read an essay every few days, then I probably would have a kinder outlook on this book.

But here's the kicker as to why I can't simply dismiss this book. Do you know the game "Table Topics"? Or have you read the If...? books? They work on the same premise... posing a "what if" kind of question that you're supposed to then discuss with people. This may seem lame, because it implies that you can't have a natural conversation with your friends without the assistance of cards, but I found them amusing in college... and probably still would, given a particularly creative bunch of friends and a few bottles of wine. "If you could only listen to one album again for the rest of your life, what would it be?" "If you had to kill an innocent person to end world hunger, could you?" "If you were exiled from your current country, what new country would you pick as your new home?" "Which famous dead person would you most want to have a dinner conversation with?" "If you could either sleep with one famous person and never tell anyone or give the impression of a deep and loving relationship to the world but never actually sleep with them... which scenario would you pick?" (I actually think he did pose this question somewhere in the book...)

Anyway... there's one "essay" in this book that's my favorite part, not just because it's funny, but because it seems like it unwittingly captures the whole essence of the other articles -- or at least distills what good this book can accomplish. It's a small section of twenty three questions that the author would pose to a person and their answers would determine whether or not this could be his soulmate. Think of Table Topic and If...? questions (like those above) and multiply them by ten on a specific and weird scale... then you'd get the kind of questions that he asks.

For example, here's a fairly ordinary but still interesting one:

Every person you have ever slept with is invited to a banquet where you are the guest of honor. No one will be in attendance except you, the collection of your former lovers, and the catering service. After the meal, you are asked to give a fifteen-minute speech to the assembly. What do you talk about?

And here's a weird one that I quite enjoy:

Defying all expectation, a group of Scottish marine biologists capture a live Loch Ness Monster. In an almost unbelievable coincidence, a bear hunter in the Pacific Northwest shoots a Sasquatch in the thigh, thereby allowing zoologists to take the furry monster into captivity. These events happen on the same afternoon. That evening, the president announces he may have thyroid cancer and will undergo a biopsy later that week. You are the front page editor of The New York Times: What do you play as the biggest story? 

And one more for kicks:

Someone builds and optical portal that allows you to see a vision of your own life in the future (it’s essentially a crystal ball that shows a randomly selected image of what your life will be like in twenty years). You can only see into this portal for thirty seconds. When you finally peer into the crystal, you see yourself in a living room, two decades older than you are today. You are watching a Canadian football game, and you are extremely happy. You are wearing a CFL jersey. Your chair is surrounded by books and magazines that promote the Canadian Football League, and there are CFL pennants covering your walls. You are alone in the room, but you are gleefully muttering about historical moments in Canadian football history. It becomes clear that—for some unknown reason—you have become obsessed with Canadian football. And this future is static and absolute; no matter what you do, this future will happen. The optical portal is never wrong. This destiny cannot be changed. The next day, you are flipping through television channels and randomly come across a pre-season CFL game between the Toronto Argonauts and the Saskatchewan Roughriders. Knowing your inevitable future, do you now watch it? 

Okay, last one, for real:

Let us assume you met a rudimentary magician. Let us assume he can do five simple tricks--he can pull a rabbit out of his hat, he can make a coin disappear, he can turn the ace of spades into the Joker card, and two others in a similar vein. These are his only tricks and he can't learn any more; he can only do these five. HOWEVER, it turns out he's doing these five tricks with real magic. It's not an illusion; he can actually conjure the bunny out of the ether and he can move the coin through space. He's legitimately magical, but extremely limited in scope and influence. Would this person be more impressive than Albert Einstein? 

These make me think that Chuck Klosterman missed his true calling as a "Table Topics for Gen X" writer. ALL of his essays seem to serve one purpose for me: they're mildly interesting, but they make me think of more interesting things that I then actually want to discuss with other people.

Weirdest thing of all, but I actually think this might be a good book for discussion at book club... not for discussing the merits of the book, but because Klosterman's random topics (the true meaning of Saved by the Bell, the weird interest he has in people who have met serial killers and lived, etc.) will hopefully inspire other things we want to talk about in the Table Topics sense of things.

My mother tried to make the point that perhaps Klosterman was really intending to inspire conversation with these topics. At first, I found it hard to believe that Klosterman, who writes about saved by the Bell and cartoon cereal characters, is really trying to inspire discussion... but that's totally it. I might find his writing to be somewhat lacking, but he really is creating a jumping-off-point for people who might find these topics to be of interest.

So Klosterman, despite all of the complaints I have, I give you three stars.


Oh, and if you don't pick the Loch Ness Monster, then I don't understand what you could possibly be thinking.

Didn't finish it - I really liked the beginning but I got bored in the middle, read 2 other books and couldn't be bothered to pick it up again.

Not bad. There were a couple chapters that were yawns but for the most part this was a pretty enjoyable book. The first chapter was absolutely hysterical.

The author deconstructs pop culture in such a hilarious way—entire chapters are devoted to Billy Joel, Pamela Anderson, Saved by the Bell, Star Wars, and other major people and points of entertainment that will be familiar to any '70s or '80s kid. I heard and read a lot of buzz for many years about this book and had to see what it was about. I’m glad I finally read it. The only boring spots were some sports chapters—don't watch it and don't get—but the rest of the book was entertaining and thought-provoking.

At the beginning of the essay entitled "Toby over Moby", Klosterman mentions a review he wrote of a Chicks concert (they were The Dixie Chicks at the time). Some people were apparently angry about a not-super-flattering description of singer Natalie Haines's body that Klosterman felt compelled to include in his review. His apology, which wasn't an apology, was effectively: "My bad, I didn't realize she was pregnant."

Here are a few other awful moments from Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs:

- When Klosterman devotes an entire essay to the sex lives of Pamela Anderson and Marilyn Monroe, comparing their roles as sex symbols.
- The "anti-homeless interlude" (that's actually what it's called) where Klosterman expresses his dissatisfaction with how homeless people treat him. The interlude ends with this line that somehow no editor raised an eyebrow at: "That's the problem with homeless people: To them, we're all just a number."
- This shameless admission: "When I was twenty-one, I was adamantly anti-abortion and anti-death penalty; these were very clear ideas to me. However, things have since happened in my life, and now I have no feelings about either issue. And I'm sincere about that; I really have no opinion about abortion or the death penalty. Somehow, they don't even seem important."
- Klosterman's skill with "rhetorical misdirection" (his words), which effectively means that he enjoys confusing people in order to defeat them in arguments and prove how smart he is.

These are indicative of the man behind these essays, and the essays themselves. There is not much redeeming about either.

These essays are from around 2003 and 2004, which is much longer ago than I realized. For context, that's before Netflix started streaming movies. It's before Spotify, Facebook, and YouTube were invented, and it's before smartphones were really a thing. It feels important to situate these essays in that context, because they were written in a time before AI was generating personalized playlists, before digital media were available to us anywhere instantly, and before celebrities were able to effortlessly communicate with their fans directly. Which is to say, it was a time when music criticism (and general cultural criticism) served an important function, at least for those people who were interested in learning about that stuff. Which I imagine is how Klosterman, with his encyclopedic knowledge of music/movies/etc., managed to get these essays published.

The only reason I gave Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs two stars instead of one is that some of the essays (the few that aren't misogynistic, elitist, or overly critical - solely for shock factor, it would seem) are actually enjoyable. "Being Zack Morris" is an interesting look at how those of us from a certain time related to Saved By The Bell. The "hypothetical interlude" had some genuinely good conversation starters. And I enjoyed his essays about music (like the one about why Billy Joel is great), but I think that's just because I like the topic, not because they were necessarily good essays.

I mean, he spends over a page talking about how awful Coldplay are, in particular their song "Yellow". In the space of two paragraphs, he uses no fewer than 12 expletives to describe a band and a song, both of which, let's be honest, a large number of people really like. Klosterman on the band's breakthrough single: "That sleepy-eyed bozo isn't even making sense. He's just pouring fabricated emotions over four gloomy guitar chords, and it ends up sounding like love." I mean 1) true, but maybe look up "ballad" in the dictionary, and 2) it could be argued that that's exactly what makes the song impressive, and so special for so many people. (And 3), nearly every chord in the song is a major chord, so I'm not sure I'd classify them, or the song itself, as "gloomy".) When Klosterman isn't being smug, he's whining too fervently about things like this, or about women who won't date him. And when he gets whiny, his rhetorical misdirection starts to wane, and it becomes too easy to refute his arguments, which doesn't exactly improve his writing.

So anyway, don't read this book.

This book only merit is recreating perfectly in written form the experience of being cornered by some borderline incel that talks compulsively about pop culture because he loves the acoustics of his voice reverberating up his own ass.

Look, if we take a serious look at Klosterman (and especially so if we look at the other two books of this "series": Chuck Klosterman IV and Eating the Dinosaur), then yes Klosterman is very similar to the protagonist of A Confederacy of Dunces. But while I disliked that book, I have to recommend this one.

Well, I do so with reservations:

Those who were born in my generation, born in the 80s or early 90s will like this. Those who care about Star Wars, those hipsters who are probably smiling once they hear him vocalize their thoughts, and people who probably lived under a rock in the early 90s (i.e. yours truly) would enjoy his analysis. Yet, as many have pointed out, it's a shallow one at times. For several of his essays you might wait until the end and go: "Huh? Didn't I know this already?" Still...

Klosterman is a good writer. Oftentimes, in spite of his frequently shallow conclusions, he will make you think. This is not a book to absorb like some great classic by Dostoevsky, Steinbeck, Dickens, or the other notable writers you've read in College or High School Literature courses, nor is it an extremely informal technical manual for life. This ought to be taken with a grain of salt, but it'll certainly be tasty!

All of the essays were dumb, and Chuck Klosterman seemed to be grasping at straws to make his arguments. Intelligent people don't like the movie Titanic? If two reruns from the same show are shown in one day on cable, and they're not from the same season, we can't differentiate between them and know that it's not continuity?

Also, most of the essays were at least five pages longer than they needed to be.

And I can't get over how he thinks he's the Messiah because he can argue with people about random, pointless pop culture happenings and think that anybody gives a shit. If this guy ever cornered me at a party and asked one of his asinine 23-questions-I-ask-friends (one of the "liner" notes between chapters), I'd probably find a window to jump out of before I gave him a second glance.

Also, huge misogynist. Girls don't dump you because you're not John Cusack -- they dump you because you're you and you think you're better than everybody.