The first Klosterman book I read was Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, purely because Seth Cohen was reading it on the O.C.
IV starts off with mostly interview pieces of rock starts and other famous people. Some of it is a little dated, but all of it is interesting. The middle section is more social commentary and the end is a fiction piece. I enjoyed the middle section the most. The last part was really interesting though; he has since written a fiction book called Downtown Owl: A Novel. It'd be worth checking out at least.
I like Klosterman because I can related to the things he's writ ting about. Music, drinking, relationships, the perils of buying an outfit from the Gap, and more music. He writes one piece about going into a store and buying a complete outfit that a mannequin is wearing and how that changes the perception people have of him.
He talks about the difference between a nemesis and and archenemy and why it's important to have both. He writes about eating nothing but McDonalds' chicken mcnuggets for something like a week.
A quote from the first section:
"The dumbest guy in Radiohead is still smarter (by himself) than all three members of the Beastie Boys and two-fifths of the Strokes.”
And my favorite quote from the book:
"In November 2000, the United States held a presidential election and nobody knew who won, so we just kind of made up an outcome and tried to act like that was normal. Less than a year later, airplanes flew into office buildings and everybody cried for two weeks. And then Enron went bankrupt, and then the U.S. became a rogue state, and then The Simple Life premiered, and then gasoline became unaffordable, and then our Olympic basketball team lost to Puerto Rico, and then we reelected the same unqualified president we never really elected in the first place. Later, there would be some especially devastating hurricanes and the release of a horrible movie titled Crash.
Things, as they say, have been better."
