Forum.RttP{Buy this book - Chuck Klosterman rules }

Chuck Klosterman is just like Lawrence Welk, Hunter S. Thompson, Bill Bryson, Garry Kasparov, Aristotle, Lester Bangs, Woody Allen, Nick Hornby, Dave Eggers, Michael Moore, John Ruskin, Axl Rose, Louis Theroux, and Greil Marcus—and that’s just according to the blurbs on cover copy of his latest book, Chuck Klosterman IV. If you’ve read Fargo Rock City, Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, or Killing Yourself to Live, you may have an opinion about the validity of these comparisons, but you’ll probably agree that Klosterman’s take on popular culture is uniquely his own.

A collection of his magazine writing from the last ten years, Chuck Klosterman IV reads like an extra-long issue of US Weekly re-imagined by someone smart. Just released in paperback, it includes some essays that were not in the hardcover edition and features Klosterman at his best on topics including:

•Britney Spears: “Her management team directed so much emphasis toward turning her into an unsophisticated semi-redneck that she now has no idea what is normal and what is marketing.”

•“Things to do in Disneyland if you’re goth”: “carry a Cure lunchbox as a purse,” “make devil horns whenever photographed,” “insist you’re ‘not really goth.’”

•Leather pants: “Think of your closest male friend. Now imagine if he wore leather pants. Can you foresee any scenario where you wouldn’t mock him until he cried?”

There’s more here, too, from an explanation of why Barry Bonds represents the end of metaphor in baseball to a entertainingly twisted novella about a really obnoxious guy to a list of the top ten “rated” bands—Klosterman’s term for musical acts that are valued according to their actual worth as opposed to being over- or underrated. Taken as a whole, Chuck Klosterman IV is another compulsively readable book from a “rated” writer who’s perhaps best compared to himself.