This should probably be a 3.5

Decent, but you know, overly Precious. The whole time I am reading this I am thinking, "I'd rather be reading 'A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again'. Sigh."

If life hasn't given you enough white men that are so confident in their opinions and themselves to the point of thinking everyone wants to hear their position on meaningless stuff, then maybe you'll find this book worth reading. If you've met the slightly older white guy with a Bachelor's degree that still goes to house parties and doesn't see value in being introduced to most of the people because they're women or the band on their t-shirt isn't obscure enough, then you've already read it.

I found this book to be completely atrocious. It is so thoroughly middle upper class white cis hetero male garbage trying to pretend it's something better than that. It's not. It's garbage. Everything is examined from this one lens and nothing else. It would be one thing if this book only focused on, or brought up topics that never even sniffed at intersecting with anything else, but he does, and that's where the book fails. Of course, the book starts out with bullshit philosophy and does the thing where it pits his incredibly small viewpoint against the whole of human existance and proclaims everyone who disagrees with him to be "retarded." Yup. He uses that word exactly. Not just once. Multiple times. If your life doesn't line up with his view of the world that's the word that he uses to describe you. It only gets better from there. He sets about to explain how pop culture influences america, and so Black people fit themselves into this real world idea of blackness because of casts members. Everyone fits into these categories. He says stupid racist stuff about Brazilian football fans and backs it up with more racism. Of course it has nothing to do with him being racist, those people are just stupid losers. That's the tone of the entire book. It's so fucking stupid.

Okay so I get what Klosterman is doing here, and I can see how plenty of people actually like it. But I did.not.dig.

Actually, that is one of my nonsensical pet peeves in my books. Even when I am reading contemporary fiction which one would pretty much assume would have modern references, it just annoys me when author's mention things like Facebook, or IG, or Twitter, or even things like iPods, Jamba Juice, Beyonce, Twilight, etc. I don't exactly know why, but I just think that we can do without going so far as to cite things by name. Plenty of authors manage just fine without, I've always felt that it sorta detracts from the story, even from the very sentence itself. It's like…distracting. A substitution for a thought. So knowing that I feel this way about the smallest reference, then one can imagine how and why I would have such a poor reaction to Klosterman.

Yes, I understand that the whole modern culture thing is the whole gosh darn point of the book. To poke fun, analyze, criticize all the craziness that is modern culture. But I had to literally force myself to get thru this. It was alright for about ONE chapter, after that it got tiresome, redundant, excessive, and then just down right annoying! When I don't like the first book I read by an author who comes highly recommended and who is revered by a significant amount of people, I usually am open to giving the author another chance with another read of a different book. People don't always like every single thing an adored author writes after all. But in this case, I will absolutely not be picking up anything by him ever again. I absolutely hated every single minute of this book, and even tho Klosterman's covers can be bright and aesthetically appealing, I will not make the same mistake twice. There is no way I will ever again waste precious reading time on this man. Tho I don't regret reading this, if only to have discovered that Klosterman is not my type.

And despite all this, despite my genuine dislike of the book…I can still see how it would appeal to others. To each his own.

There are many, many parts of this collection I loved like they were my own children. There are a few pieces that didn't quite hold up, but hell, even Michael Jordan didn't always score 40 points per game EVERY game. Klosterman is like some alternative universe David Foster Wallace, and perhaps in time I will know the chicken/egg role that DFW played for Klosterman or Klosterman played for DFW. Both seem like guys who have spent far too much of their life reading far too much Wittgenstein while thinking of Tom Cruise, sugared cereal and the virtues of serial killers. There are certain writers who I'd really like some form of divine advanced notice on where exactly God will put them after this earth life is over, cause wherever they go, I need to reserve seats.

For aging hipsters who loved the movie Vanilla Sky and the smell of their own farts.

This book was a total waste of time. As a huge fan of philosophy, my breaking point was only by page 20. I thought, this whole book can't be THAT bad...so I flipped around and read snippets from later chapters to make sure I wasn't selling it short. But alas, no, this was truly a masterpiece of crap. Its just some hipster-type asshole, who thinks he's got it all figured out, and says things like, "If you define your personality as 'creative,' it only means you understand what is PERCEIVED to be creative to the world at large, so you're really just following a rote creative template. Thats the OPPOSITE of creativity." (Chuck Klosterman, pg 14) This is just one of many examples that really pissed me off to the point where I wanted to stop reading...Klosterman just sounds like an over-educated, arrogant Greenwich Villager, with a mind closed so tight he's lacking enough oxygen to think straight.

But that's just my opinion. Im just sayin...

This book came recommended by Jayne Kenney and Ryan Pollyea, so it was a blind buy. The book is, in short, a high-brow manifesto of low culture. In other words, it tries to define the human experience through modern reality TV, pop music and tabloid icons. Each chapter is its own essay, with little to no continuity between each. It’s an interesting read because our generation knows everything he’s talking about. Not twenty pages into the book, he had already declared his hatred for Coldplay and quote Metallica’s “One” while talking about killing his avatar in the popular video game, The Sims. In other words, I was a fan at first impression.

But not for the whole book. There are several reasons why I wasn’t thrilled with this one. For one, Klosterman reads like the kind of person I would hate to be around. He doesn’t seem to really “like” anything, and treats most cultural cornerstones with contempt and disgust. This is oftentimes a good thing, because most of would agree that most of pop culture is absolute crap. But with the random exception, he tends to look down on most everything. You can imagine him being the hipster in the corner with the privileged opinion that few people want to hear.

The other issue I have with this book might have to do with my intelligence (or lack of it), because half of the things he says make little to no sense to me. Just when I think I’ve latched onto the “point” of each chapter, he makes another grandiose statement that seems to break the space/time continuum … but he’s talking about a Guns ‘n Roses tribute band? I think where he lost me the most was when he was describing Pam Anderson as the new Marilyn Monroe but for 40 different reasons. Though his brief rant on “Left Behind”, the fiction series about the Biblical prophecy of the Rapture.

On the whole, it was a fun read. But I think I expected something different; a more straightforward, almost sociological focus and not a philosophical exposition of the modern man as illustrated by his artistic tendencies and contemporaries.

Klosterman is a proto-hipster. I hate him for it.

Google preview shows that in just twenty seven pages there are eleven instances of the word "postmodern[ism:]" (and explains it each time), fourteen instances of "irony" in one form or another, and he uses "wrong," as in "here's why they are wrong," a whopping thirty times. There were only three reasons I finished this book:

1) The same motivation as rubber necking highway accidents and going to see nascar.

2) So I could authoritatively tell people not to bother reading it.

3) Because with each passing page my hatred for Klosterman became stronger.

If I had purchased this book, I would be motivated to find this man and land a swift kick between his legs.

I've been reading a lot of books of essays lately -- Emily Gould, Sloane Crosley, Chuck Klosterman, David Foster Wallace. Except for Wallace, they just make me want to punch people. Grammatical errors aside -- and there are so many in this book that I called a friend in publishing from the airport in which I was reading it and asked "Who the hell proofreads these things?" -- it's vaguely profane, vaguely profound nothingness, sort of fortune-cookie David Foster Wallace.

And I realized: David Foster Wallace is trying to explain things, things so complicated and heart locked that there's almost no way to say them. That's why the endless footnotes, the runaround sentences. It's not that he doesn't want to be clear, it's that it's difficult to be clear and he's trying to explain the best way he knows how. The rest of these guys are just trying to be clever and quotable. I think I would have enjoyed this a lot more if I hadn't been reading "Consider the Lobster" just before it. Real honesty in essays is rare, and once you get used to it everything else looks tarnished.

The other thing is this: Klosterman works the same side of the street as Nick Hornby, but -- and this is astounding, since he's writing essays and not fictional characters, no matter how obviously they're based on himself -- he doesn't have the same gift of voice that Hornby does. Actually, it's not astounding at all: the fact that he's not entirely putting himself out there, that he's got a protective veneer of "fiction" makes it easier for Hornby to be honest, I think. Klosterman is airing himself to the world, and even though he pulls no punches on being sort of an unattractive jerky guy in the way you suspect many people are jerks underneath, his insights into himself seem lazily constructed.

Is there seriously no way to save a review you're halfway finished with? There must be.

Klosterman's essays make funny and relevant points about pop culture and an aging Gen Xer's reflections on how it impacts our lives. The unique thing is that even though he writes about a lot of things that have become cliches to comment on (Star Wars, The Real World, relationships, etc.), he avoids coming across as yet another version of Kevin Smith by noting that they are cliches, and humorously explores why a segment of America became obsessed with them in the first place.