I don’t typically use this space as a venue for book reviews (I tend to do that over at GoodReads), but I just can’t seem to pass up this opportunity.

I have just finished reading Chuck Klosterman’s Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs , a book whose title is oddly fitting despite Klosterman’s hardcore word-choice. That said, the title is probably the most shocking part of the book itself, which is truly a peek into the mind of a modern genius. Finishing it presented me with an odd desire - the second that I set the book down on my coffee table and sat up, all I wanted to do was pick it back up and read it once more. But this is merely one of the interesting predicaments that this book has put me into since I turned its first page.

Before I explain, let me first make a small (but necessary) confession: there aren’t many issues that I can exactly pinpoint myself as having, but I think that I can honestly say that I have issues keeping my mouth shut about something great that I’ve discovered. Maybe it’s the Market Maven mentality, or simply a seemingly annoying personality quirk, but I cannot deny that I, upon finding something new an interesting, cannot help but share it with those around me.

While Apple products are usually my vessels for such advertisements, this week it was, without question, Klosterman’s manifesto. After both laughing out loud and stopping to think about the true depth of what I had just read, I couldn’t help but share various parts with my roommates or whoever was close-by at the time (regardless of their expressed interest in what I was saying or Klosterman was writing). Of particular noteworthiness was a series of questions introduced as “the twenty-three questions I ask everybody I meet in order to decide if I can really love them.” This was an interlude between chapters, and involved questions such as:

“For reasons that cannot be explained, cats can suddenly read at a twelfth-grade level. They can’t talk and they can’t write, but they can read silently and understand the text. Many cats love this new skill, because they now have something to do all day while they lay around the house; however, a few cats become depressed, because reading forces them to realize the limitations of their existence (not to mention the utter frustration of being unable to express themselves). This being the case, do you think the average cat would enjoy Garfield, or would cats find this cartoon to be an insulting caricature?”

It is writing like this, or even this line of thinking, that makes the classification or even description of this book nearly impossible. Klosterman has chapters devoted to topics ranging from Saved By The Bell, to country music, to The Real World. And he does this in the most curious of ways - the book is organized quite literally like a mixtape, with seemingly arbitrary song lengths attached to each chapter name in the table of contents.

I was fortunate to spend this July 4th weekend with a fantastic group of people, I could not help but tell them about the sheer brilliance of what I was reading. However, each time that I tried explaining to them what the book was about, I either sounded like a blind-faith fanboy or a blabbering buffoon. The reason for this difficulty, as I only realized later, has mostly to do with the fact that Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs could best be described as a series of blog posts. Not this sort of blog, but the kind of blog that Hank Moody would write for Hell-A magazine, the kind of blog that keeps you glued to the screen with the strange desire to simply be the author’s friend. Klosterman’s blog (which is both much-needed and non-existant) would be filled with pages of the most well written, pop culture infused, ADD-natured panache available on the internet today.

That’s basically how I feel about Chuck Klosterman now. Given the opportunity, it’d be extremely fun so simply hang out with the guy, not in a “hang-out-with-a-famous-person” kind of way but in a “I-could-really-see-myself-being-friends-with-this-guy” way. So to speak.

If you were born between 1975 and 1990 and haven’t read Klosterman’s masterpiece, I highly recommend Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs . Wow, I don’t think I’ve ever said a sentence like that before.