Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Klosterman said that the Metallica/Lou Reed collaboration, LuLu, was, “Bold, Uncompromising, and totally unlistenable.” I would say that this book is bold, uncompromising, and (mostly) unreadable. Stylistically, this is vastly different from anything Klosterman has ever written. While there is a swear and a joke here and there, the prose is mostly dry and pedantic. I kept waiting for his witty, conversational tone to appear, but it never really did. This is pretty much a philosophy book about time, epistemology, and metaphysics, which is fine, but far from what any Chuck Klosterman fan would be expecting. All of Klosterman’s nonfiction goes off into tangents, but it always comes right back to the main point. The tangents in this book often go off and never come back. He makes big ideas, small (as opposed to his other books which make small ideas, big), but there are just too many big ideas in this book and they can’t really be expounded upon in only 272 pages. Malcolm Gladwell’s influence can definitely be felt here and I think what was so disappointing was that most of this book is comprised of Chuck just presenting other people’s complicated theories in a more simplistic manner. Also, the thesis of the book is pretty self-evident: the perception of everything changes over time. Again, all of Klosterman’s other books have been great, but who knows? Maybe in a hundred years this will be considered his masterpiece. What if I’m wrong?