Eating The Dinosaur

It's been a long time since I posted a book here, so hopefully I can break that trend and read a bit more in 2016. Chuck Klosterman's Eating The Dinosaur feels like the sequel to his breakthrough essay collection Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto in that it's simply a collection of essays, mostly dealing with pop culture. When I wrote about that book four years ago I gave lots of quick-hit thoughts on each individual essay. This time around I read the first half of Eating the Dinosaur several months ago and the second half more recently, so I wouldn't be able to recall some of the less interesting essays. I will say that my personal favorite essays in Eating the Dinosaur were about comparing Kurt Cobain to the leader of the Branch Davidian cult, why football is Chuck's favorite sport because of its constant evolution, and a brutal critique on the concept of laugh tracks. If there's one way Eating the Dinosaur is different from Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs (aside from references to more recent events as it was published in 2009), it's that Klosterman's style has become a bit more personal. Lots of Klosterman's writing has felt a bit alien in a way to me, calling out non-sensical and odd things in pop culture that I (and the rest of society) have always ignored, like's some other species trying to understand people through the music and television they consume. Here however you get a bit more insight as to who he is, talking about his own insecurities or what's important to him. It's a small change, and most of these essays could have fit into any previous collection, but I liked Eating the Dinosaur just fine and I'm still looking forward to whatever else he'll publish.