I don’t think I’ve ever done a traditional “review” of a book before here. I’ve done video games, movies, even albums, like years ago. It doesn’t feel like it was that long ago that I was doing reviews of pieces of media all the time. “Piece of media” doesn’t feel right to say, too general, but I’m not going to say “works of art” when I used to review, like, Kelly Slater’s Pro Surfer. It hits me the last time that the last time I reviewed a video game or a movie or an album was No Thing for the Switch back in mid-2018. That was nearly four years ago. It doesn’t feel like four years ago, it doesn’t feel that long ago at all, but it was that long ago. Is that just how four years feels? Is it just that a lot of the past two years specifically haven’t felt like they moved at a normal pace? Or do we experience time differently than we used to?
That is, more or less, one of the themes made by Chuck Klosterman in his book The Nineties, published in early 2022 by Penguin Press, a book that I got through in record pace, like maybe a week. The judgment of this book’s quality in this ‘review’ should be summed up by that fact. Because I’ve made a point in recent posts to be more open about stating personal opinions that may lead to ridicule on social media (I genuinely don’t know if this would or not) I should point out that Chuck is probably my favorite living writer, one of the only people for whom I will purchase a new book immediately upon publication without needing to know the premise. I generally don’t buy that many brand new books in a given year anyway. As someone who has read Klosterman’s entire catalogue, this is my second favorite book of his next to But What if We’re Wrong from 2016, or at least, that’s how I feel after having finished this last weekend.
I suppose this post is more or less a response, a post in which I use The Nineties as a jumping off point for some thoughts of my own. I think that’s what you do in book reviews.