Books: Chuck Klosterman & Others

I’m taking a break from Douglas Coupland. I’ve now moved onto Chuck Klosterman. I was in the bookstore browsing and came across “Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto” and flipped through it and landed in the middle of a list of 23 questions he would ask in order to know if he could truly love someone. It’s a great list of hypothetical questions and made me want to read more from him. One of the questions is would you rather have your collarbone broken every year or take a pill that would make all music sound like Alice Cooper is singing it, or something like that. I might have combined two questions, my memory is not so great. Anyway, I’d break my collarbone. Another question concerned a dream VCR that records all your dreams while you’re sleeping, but in order to watch them, you have to let all your friends and family see your dreams. Do you watch? NO. I’m already disturbed enough by some of the dreams that I do remember and I’m glad that I can forget some of them– that’s why I stopped writing down all of my dreams, because I didn’t want to remember them later. And it works. I’ve written about dreams on many occasions and sometimes I’ll just write that I had a bad dream and don’t want to think about it anymore, and provide no other details and hope that I forget everything, and I do. When I look back at those dream entries, I have no idea what the bad dream was. And I’m glad. I don’t want to know what I’m dreaming about all the time. I’d like to know the happy or fun dreams, but not if I have to know about all the crazy disturbing ones. It would bug me too much, I would constantly be wondering why I dreamt about that. And if I don’t want to know about them, then there’s no way I’m going to let other people see them. Most of the  other questions were not so clear-cut for me, I would have to mull them over a while before deciding.

Last night I started reading “Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas“. It’s a collection of articles he’s written for various magazines. It’s quite good so far. I’ve flipped ahead and read through almost all of the hypothetical questions in the following section, but can’t remember them at the moment. Most of them were longer, more involved scenarios. So far I’ve read about Britney Spears, Bono, and Val Kilmer. All very enjoyable reads.

And now, the others.

• Chasing Harry Winston: Lauren Weisberger

I started reading that on the weekend, and almost immediately decided that I was NOT going to like this book. I didn’t like the characters, but I didn’t really give them much of a chance. The next day I flipped through to the end to see how things ended up and it didn’t make me feel like I ought to go back and actually read the book. That’s too bad, because I really liked “Everyone Worth Knowing”.

• The Host: Stephanie Meyer

Another one that I didn’t even bother trying to read. I flipped through the pages and pages, it’s over 400 pages, possibly even over 500, I can’t remember at the moment, but I just had no interest in reading it. I didn’t even read a word of it. And I felt bad for keeping it since there are so many other people dying to read it, so I returned it.

• Love The One You’re With: Emily Giffen

This is still on my holds list, but I think I will cancel it. I read the last two pages of it today. It ended sort of how I expected it to. And I figure I don’t really need to know how it got there. I loved her first book “Something Borrowed” but haven’t loved anything from hers quite like that again.

So this makes me wonder if I’ve gone off chick-lit. I used to love the stuff and now I don’t like it? Or maybe I’m bored with it, but will come back to it eventually? Or maybe I’m just not that into fiction anymore, because I also stopped reading “Miss Wyoming”, which is not chick-lit, and was actually an interesting book, from the little that I had read of it, but I was in no rush to finish it. There’s a difference though, I am absolutely certain that I will read Miss Wyoming, likely later this year, but those three books listed above? I highly doubt I’ll ever read them unless I’m stuck on a beach somewhere and can’t fall asleep.

I’ve abandonned a number of books in the last few weeks:

The Eden Express- Mark Vonnegut — It’s his memoir about having schizophrenia and what it was like for him and how he got through it. It was quite interesting, but at the same time, kind of sad, and I didn’t really feel like reading the whole thing. I read the first few chapters and then flipped through bits, and then read the end. I actually read the end almost right away because I wanted to find out what happened to his dog.

Socrates In Love- Christopher Phillips — This has not officially been abandonned, but I highly doubt I will read the whole book. It is my bathroom book of the moment, as were Eden Express, and Microserfs. But I got hooked on Microserfs and then gobbled it up, and this one, I’ve already started the flipping process and it will likely go back to the library fairly soon.

There were also some other books in paperback and hardcover that looked interesting in the library but once I got them home, were not too compelling. I don’t remember their titles.