48. Eating the Dinosaur

48. Eating the Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman (2/27/2012 - 3/15/2012)

This book upset me.  I love Chuck Klosterman, I really do. I have read all but his most recent book, and Killing Yourself to Live, his non-fiction account of traveling across the country investigating the deaths of rock stars, is one of my favorite books of all time.

But not this book. Too many of these essays are just out and out boring -- they almost feel like Klosterman is being intentionally dense and boring just to fuck with me as a faithful reader.  The voice is still entirely his, of course, but he seems to have lost some of the clever humor that made me love his nonfiction in the first place. What remains is the voice of a self-indulgent guy who enjoys thinking deeply about just about anything that's not actually relevant.

For example, the first essay in the book runs about 40-50 pages and discusses, at length, why people feel compelled to answer when they are being interviewed.  I'll grant that there is probably deep psychological reasoning behind why we do in fact answer intimate questions from strangers in an interview setting, but I suspect that it can be summed up in just a few words about most people's inherently self-promoting outlooks. I'm not saying that all people are selfish; I'm saying that people like to talk about themselves. Isn't that an established fact? I seem to encounter it a lot as a great way to get to know someone on a date when I happen to flip through Cosmo in a checkout-line. Look: people like to talk about themselves. I just saved you from reading this awful essay.

While I skipped the essay on why football is essential to American society, I do have to say that there were several awesome essays in this book.  In one, Klosterman delves into the scary-true predictions made by the Unabomber's manifesto about technology, and the results in this essay are fascinating.  Additionally, while writing about Alfred Hitchcock, Klosterman asserts that "learning should be the primary goal of living," an idea that, as a educator, I tend to agree with.  So the book is overall not without its gems, but I suspect that if you just google "Hitchcock's Vertigo Chuck Klosterman," you'll turn up with that essay and you can skip the rest of the book.

Finally, I'd like to recognize that the most memorable part of this book was when Klosterman states that, as far as he's concerned, the best possible result of time travel would be being able to eat a dinosaur. Awesome.

This is a fairly confusing book -- I'd prefer to re-read Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs instead.