Bill's Book Corner

Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas by Chuck Klosterman

Chuck Klosterman is a generally considered a pop culture writer, who writes about sports, television and sex, was born in Minnesota and once wrote a book about hair bands from the 80s (Fargo Rock City), so I figured his books would be up my alley. After reading this book, I was not disappointed. 90% of the book was fantastic, and we'll focus on that for now.

The title is in reference to the fourth Led Zepplin album (Untitled but generally called Led Zepplin IV). The book is a collection of articles that he wrote for Spin, GQ and Esquire. He highlighted many of his chapters with introductions that posed hypothetical situations that got you thinking. The highlights of the book for me included the week he ate nothing but McDonalds chicken nuggets (a few years before Morgan Spurlock, and with much less drama) and the 24-hour marathon of VH1 Classic (when they were commercial-free and 95% videos) ***Book critic alert*** His knowledge of pop culture is spot-on and delivers an acerbic view of the world around us. ***Alert over***

Now the painful 10% part. For the last part of his book, that seemed to be a semi-autobiographical recant of some of his heavily drugged early years. It ends with a woman falling from the sky and crashing into his car, then having his psuedo-girlfriend come and pick him up.

Overall it was a very interesting read and I would recommend it.

Grade - B+