This book was recommended to me by a friend. She told me that I would enjoy this book because it is a guy writing about random observations that he notices in everyday life, like for instance why Americans laugh in social situations regardless of whether something funny has happened, whereas Germans don’t. My curiosity was aroused as I often make the same sort of random observations myself. What she failed to mention was the majority of the book focuses around three topics that I could not care less about – sport, celebrities and pop music. Throw that into the mix with the odd American cultural reference and there is no way I am going to enjoy this book. To be honest the only reason I persevered was in the hope that the next chapter would stray far enough from Sport or Music to peak my interest. Well, that and the fact that I (used to) value my friends opinion.
The first 20% of the book was about Nirvana or more specifically Kurt Cobain and comparing him to a cult leader. OK I thought, so it wasn’t my topic of choice but then things started looking up in the next chapter about time travel which is certainly interesting but unfortunately only one of the very few accessible chapters in this book. It was then followed by a tedious slog about basketball which was when I did something that I have never done before when reading a book, I started to skip pages. Looking back I probably should have gone with my initial instinct, that if you ever find yourself skipping pages in a book that isn’t educational then you should give up reading that book, but I figured there was clearly no connection between chapters so it didn’t really matter.
The only other chapter worth mentioning in a positive way was the short chapter on voyeurism. Unfortunately the chapter after that, or rather essays as Chuck Klosterman insists on calling them, made me want to tear the book up. It’s when I realised the author isn’t an author at all, he’s a critic and if there’s one thing I can’t stand more than tabloid journalists, it’s a critic. I have never seen the point in a profession of someone giving an opinion and complete strangers are supposed to give a shit. Hopefully the rise of the internet, where mass opinion collated on review sites are far more useful than that of any individual, will see the end of the profession altogether. But what really irks me about critics is when they start giving their opinion as though it is somehow gospel truth. Let me give you a few examples of what I mean and why I instantly felt hatred towards myself for wasting my time reading this book.
Early in the chapter about road movies he suggests “…at least three questions, some of which are equally cliche but all of which are hard to answer: What is a road Movie, really? Why do so many directors (from so many different eras) long to make them? And what makes traveling by car any more inherently interesting – or even all that different – than staying in one place?”
This is basically what the entire chapter is based on. Three very easy to answer and completely pointless questions. In fact I will answer those questions now:
1. A movie about people getting from point A to point B with a lot of things happening in between. Really. That’s it. No need to over analyse.
2. Directors make them because I imagine they find them interesting to make. Plus people want to watch them. Always a bonus if you’re making a movie. Again, no need to read to much into it.
3. What makes it interesting is the same thing that makes actual road trips interesting, a lot more stuff can happen than if you stay in the same mundane place doing the same mundane shit everyday.
That really is all there is to it but of course I have to give credit to Chuck Klosterman, as most critcs manage to do and what pisses me off so much, for coming up with a reason to write so much nonsense about nothing.
During this analysis into these “hard to answer” questions he is writing about a movie called Easy rider “When Jack Nicholson’s character says things like “This used to be a hell of a good country! I don’t know what happened to it,” he is essentially suggesting the discovery of America in reverse.” How does that mean that??!? I’m going to suggest he doesn’t mean that in any way shape or form and critics make shit up like this all the time just for the sake of something to do.
The rest of the chapters are more of this sort of drivel about random topics including American football(skipped, couldn’t care less about), Abba(mostly skipped) and advertising (somewhat interesting).
To be fair you may get more out of it if you are American and you enjoy over analytical essays about any of these topics. However I am English and feel sorry for the trees that had to die so this waste of ink could be inscribed on the pages of this book. One thing I did take from this book is Chuck Klosterman suggests negativity writes itself and I would agree as this is certainly a negative review about the worst book I’ve ever read and it is the one which I have had the most to write about.
Overall: 25%
I give it 25% because of the 70% I read I probably enjoyed about 25% of it.