Chuck Klosterman - Eating the Dinosaur

Chuck Klosterman may just be the snarkiest human being alive, but if you enjoy his brand of irreverent, sometimes poignant humor, then you should be in for a treat.

I can't say that for sure, of course, since I haven't read the book yet myself, but if works like Killing Yourself to Live and Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs are any indication of Klosterman's ability to skewer modern pop culture, then I have no qualms in supporting it.

What Klosterman does especially well is take a given assumption - country music sucks / people hate country music - and analyze it so that he doesn't necessarily agree but finds a more prescient truth hidden in the debate. That is the brilliance in his writing. He's not just a music snob casually hurling spittle on cheap and tawdry forms of music (or at culture at large). He's often surprising in his observations, and that's what draws me into his writing every time.

Here's a blurb from Amazon:

In Eating the Dinosaur, Klosterman is more entertaining and incisive than ever. Whether he's dissecting the boredom of voyeurism, the reason why music fan's inevitably hate their favorite band's latest album, or why we love watching can't-miss superstars fail spectacularly, Klosterman remains obsessed with the relationship between expectation, reality, and living history. It's amateur anthropology for the present tense, and sometimes it's incredibly funny.