Sic Semper Tyrannis

Whatcha' Readin'?

Sorry, my babies, if you’ve been looking for updates on here lately. The temperamental firewall filters here at work have been disallowing me to post. So, if I go an inordinate amount of time between posts, you’ll at least know why. It’s not because I don’t like you.

I’ve read a couple, actually three, books since last we spoke. One was called Bobos in Paradise by David Brooks, recommended by dear old dad. “Bobos” is short for “Bourgeois Bohemians,” a supposedly new group that Brooks identifies—a class of people beginning in the 90s that eschews traditional crass consumerism for more “politically correct” consumption, for example. He goes to great lengths to describe these folks and at various points I thought “I know people like that.” However, written in the late 90s, his idealistic, flowery, “everybody’s happy” political assessment of the future could not have been less prescient in the post 9/11 world, which is quite sad to me.

I also read Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, and I must say, I was largely unconvinced by the things he was saying. He proposes that humans are capable and wired to make rapid, correct decisions much more quickly than we give ourselves credit for. This was really more a book about the snap judgments that experts in various fields are able to make.

And finally, I’m now ¾ of the way through the Chuck Klosterman oeuvre. Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story was a bit of a disappointment to me, largely since I don’t know what he was trying to do with it. Is it a death travel-novel a la Sarah Vowell’s Assassination Vacation? Is it a love story confessional? The one question I had to qsk myself through the whole book was “Why should I care about Chuck Klosterman’s love life, again?”

Sure, he’s a pretty clever pop culture commenter but that doesn’t earn him permission to tell the stories of his personal life as if they have some greater meaning. It seems a little presumptuous. And presenting them side-by-side with the stories of “rock n’ roll deaths” like Kurt Cobain, Sid and Nancy, the Allman Brothers and the big Bopper is just forced. This book read like a writer struggling with deadline pressure and an inflated self-importance.

posted by Mike @ 9:50 AM