Showing posts with label klosterman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label klosterman. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

meh



This book caught my eye while I was working at B&N the other day. One of the great things about working and B&N is that you can check out hardcover books for free. This is so we can talk about the books to customers or something crazy like that. So I checked this one out.

I'm a big fan of Klosterman, but this book fell a little short. The chapters are surrounded by interview excerpts, but these interviews aren't labeled and I didn't know who any of these interviews were actually with. Give me a footnote or something. Jeesh.

While I enjoyed his chapters on time travel and ABBA, this book just wasn't what I hoped for. I even stuck it out during the chapter on football and chuckled a few times, but still. Meh.


Side note: I sometimes am really surprised when I read about things that are happening right now. I'm so used to reading literature from forever ago that's it's weird to see the word Twitter in an actual book.

Friday, July 17, 2009

IV


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."