Author: Chuck Klosterman
Eddie and I bought this audiobook to listen to when we were driving around Hawaii. Even though I've read basically all of Klosterman's nonfiction books, they're not the kinds of books I'd normally imagine myself enjoying. For one thing, he writes almost exclusively about rock music, about which I know very little (my most hated question when I was dating was "what kind of music do you listen to?" because I never felt like I knew enough about music to answer that in an intelligent way) and sports, about which I care even less. Yet Klosterman accompanied us up to Haleakala and down to Hana and around Diamond Head, talking about Nirvana and Ralph Sampson and football's passing game.
While I may not be all that interested in many of Klosterman's pet subjects, I have long been interested in Klosterman himself. So the act of listening to him read his own book was more fun for me than what he actually wrote. I had a friend in college who was really smart, and liked to philosophize. I'm not too dumb, but I'm not especially philosophical, and I always felt exhausted after spending an evening with him and his salon. After listening to Eating the Dinosaur, I felt sort of the same way about Klosterman. Do people really spend that much time thinking about Ted Kaczynski and relating his manifesto to the internet? Klosterman does, although not all that successfully. He is most successful when he talks about things I'm interested in (of course), like Mad Men and advertising. But I also felt like I was learning a few things along the way, like the fact that Courtney Love drove a Lexus and Mike Leach was a maverick long before he locked some ESPN anchor's kid in the broom closet.
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