I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined) by Chuck Klosterman

   So this, I suspect, is where we really begin: In any situation, the villain is the person who knows the most but cares the least...

Read this book. It's Chuck Klosterman. The end.

Okay, fine, I'll give you a little more. I Wear the Black Hat is an exploration into villains. What makes a villain? What actions or characteristics make one villain better or worse than another? What does it mean to be a villain? 

These arguments are made in typical Chuck Klosterman style. He talks about Joe Paterno, WikiLeaks, Andrew Dice Clay, and even Adolf Hitler. There is a chapter listing musicians that he hated at one point in his life. It's really essays on a vast array of subjects centered around the main theme of villains.

As usually happens when I read Klosterman's work, I had a lot of fascinating stuff to ponder. I learned new things and new sides to things I already knew. His writing style can move so swiftly from one subject to another, but I sort of love it. It's almost like stream-of-consciousness, and it makes me think I'd like to hang out with him and hear his take on everything. I dig his writing style, so I was already planning to love I Wear the Black Hat. It helps that the new book is excellent.

   We do not want to see goodness and badness as things we decide , because those are terms we need to be decided by someone else...

I received my copy of I Wear the Black Hat from Edelweiss, courtesy of Scribner and Simon & Schuster. It will be available for purchase July 9th, 2013. Because this was an unedited advanced edition, all quotes are not finalized (I promise to make sure that they are in the final book when it is printed).

Eating the Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman

I love Chuck Klosterman. Two years ago I didn't even know who Chuck Klosterman is. While scanning the bargain books at my place of employment, I found Killing Yourself to Live, read the inside flap and bought the book. I then read the book, loved it, and read Chuck Klosterman IV and Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs. There is just a certain way that Klosterman writes that brings together ideas, concepts, and people in ways that I never considered before, but ways that actually make sense. Eating the Dinosaur is the usual fare, and I enjoyed it the whole way through.

The book is divided into chapters and the chapters are divided into smaller numbered and lettered sections. These sections can sometimes meander away from the topic at hand, but everything comes together in the end to make a point about why people answer interview questions or the truths about irony as expressed by Weezer and Ralph Nader.

I admit that when I saw the chapter entitled "Football," I wasn't looking forward to reading it, especially when I saw the diagram of a play on the first page. It's not as though I hate football. I don't really think about it much in my every day life. It seemed like an achievement to me that I actually read the whole chapter even with footnotes advising a football-illiterate like me to turn back. Still, I persevered and even learned some thing about football, spread offensive, and the liberal nature of the game. It's difficult not to show at least a little appreciation for the sport when it inspired my favorite quote of the book:

Football allows the intellectual part of my brain to evolve, but it allows the emotional part to remain unchanged. It has a liberal cerebellum and a reactionary heart. And this is all I want from everything, all the time, always.

Additionally, I enjoyed the chapter on Klosterman's hatred of laugh tracks. I regularly watch "How I Met Your Mother," but I am so used to shows without a track that I often forget about all that background noise. Tonight, however, I was hyper aware of every single laugh, chuckle, giggle, cheer, etc. It was disconcerting, to say the least.

So, if you're still around, I recommend Eating the Dinosaur. You know, the book, not eating an actual dinosaur (That would have worked better out loud).