Eating the Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman
I picked this book up originally because I had read a short piece of Klosterman's on the internet somewhere and thought he was fairly amusing. I found him funny enough in this book to laugh a good bit, but I did have my issues. He's primarily a pop culture/music critic, and we differ greatly on some points. For instance, he doesn't seem to like The Big Bang Theory or How I Met Your Mother very much, calling their "credibility" into question, but immediately after that he calls The Simpsons "high-end" comedy. Don't get me wrong; I make no arguments that BBT or HIMYM are high-brow, and I sort of like the Simpsons, more several years ago than now. ( I remember watching the first pieces of it on the Tracey Ullman Show and then its very first episodes back when they originally came on and liking them.) But I mean, really? High-end comedy? Doubtful.
I only skimmed the football essay, because well, it got a bit technical. While I love to learn about a wide variety of things, specific plays and strategies in football are not among them. (Even he acknowledges that this will likely happen) That said, I LOVED his discussion of time travel. Even though it is one of my pet loves, I am not so ridiculously blind that I can't see the paradoxes and holes in it, and he does a pretty great job talking about them. I did enjoy the way he structured the essays, and the pieces on David Koresh and the Unabomber were really interesting. (What can I say? I'm a sucker for cult leaders and misanthropes.) Oh, and did you know that Werner Herzog made a "1976 Bavarian glass-blowing epic [called] Heart of Glass"? A glass-blowing epic? Who knew?
It isn't that this was a bad read, and I may pick up one of his other books in the future. However, it will likely only be if I find it at a used bookstore at which I have credit.
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