Chuck Klosterman is Terrible at Recommending Books...Here Are His Picks

If you’re reading this (and I’m not sure what’s happening here if you’re not), my assumption is that you are looking for book recommendations. If so, I have some bad news: I’m terrible at recommending books to people.

This is because I read books incorrectly. And while I’m not totally sure there’s a correct way to read books, I’m confident that–if there is–it has almost no relationship to the way I do it.
 
The process of recommending books to strangers should be simple. It seems like I should just be able to write, “I read  ______  and liked it, and I suspect you will like it, too.” But somehow, this is just impossible for me, particularly with fiction.

Very often, contemporary novels receiving excellent reviews strike me as unusually bad (either overwritten or inauthentic, or both). This makes me wonder if I might actually be better off telling strangers to read a book I don’t like. I also find that the novels I enjoy most tend to make me both depressed and self-consciously amused, which is not an emotional state I aspire to inflict upon others unless I am being paid to do so.

I’m a little better with nonfiction, although just barely. When I read nonfiction as a younger person, I was obsessed with the construction and sophistication of the prose. Now I read nonfiction like I’m fracking for petroleum. All I want is the information, delivered as accurately and straightforwardly as possible. I increasingly believe the best writing is the kind of writing the reader barely notices. Talent can be a distraction. But here again–this does not seem like good criterion for making a recommendation to someone else.
 
My opinions on art, like most opinions on art, are arguably worthless. Yet here I am, expressing them anyway: Because I’m publishing a book titled The Nineties, I have been granted an opportunity to recommend a collection of books that should (at least in theory) reflect the content of the book I am trying to sell. I could (and probably should) just list a bunch of the books I used as research material while I was writing The Nineties. But I’m not gong to do that.

Instead, I’m going to list a handful of inessential nonfiction books that glancingly mention the 1990s as a relatively bad period within the author’s life. This, I realize, is not the savviest way to promote a book about how the 1990s were fascinating. But promoting things poorly on purpose was part of what made the nineties charming.
 
When I read purely for pleasure, I tend to read books about rock music. These are typically memoirs from the artists themselves, sometimes written with the sledgehammer nuance of a person talking about themselves into a tape recorder. These are not necessarily “good books,” at least by the traditional definition of what makes a book “good.” Very often, the authors are figures who struggled during the nineties and had to reconcile how this fallow period intertwined with the rest of their amazing life. These struggles, to me, are far more compelling than the stories of their success.