A few notes on some recent reading.
Reborn in the USA by Roger Bennett (February 2022)
Bennett is a cohost of Men in Blazers, a podcast I've been listening to since its start in... well, I wasn't sure, so I tried to look it up, but I've given up after a few minutes. Shouldn't the internet make it easy to find that kind of detail?
Anyway, longtime TOA readers will know I've enjoyed the show for many years, perhaps a decade, and the show's ever-increasing profile in the soccer world always felt inevitable to me. This book isn't like Encyclopedia Blazertannica, a soccer-focused book which Bennett wrote with his cohost Michael Davies (and led to not one but two TOA posts), but is actually a pure memoir about his days growing up in 1980s Liverpool. I knew this was the idea, but it still caught me off guard to read such an open account of his teenage years. It struck me, as it does in so many other contexts, just how difficult it can be to have your differences highlighted in public before you have embraced and accepted your own individuality, which in this book is described as the specific embarrassment of being both exposed and unseen at the same time. As a teenager or even young adult, the sense of individuality can also be under attack from within, a desperate attempt to belong via the self-sabotage of trimming square pegs to fit social circles. I related to the process Bennett details of working through this aspect of growing up and emerging with a battle-tested sense of self, from which true belonging becomes possible. I don't go so far as to recommend Reborn in the USA to the general audience, but those familiar with Bennett's work should find this a quite worthwhile read.
Chuck Klosterman IV by Chuck Klosterman (December 2021)
No, this book won't rehydrate you - it's just the fourth of his books. I must admit that the sole reason I reread this 2006 collection, which brought together a range of Klosterman's published work from the early portion of his career, was that I recalled a profile about Bono where Klosterman described the experience of sitting in the front seat while the U2 frontman offered to give four teenagers a ride across town, leaving the author to ask - was this something that happened all the time? The profile was inconclusive, so I suppose if I return to Chuck Klosterman IV again in the future it will have to be for a different reason - maybe the column about the time he exclusively ate Chicken McNuggets for a whole week, or to reread "Don't Look Back in Anger", a piece loosely about the perception of US foreign policy that I assume will definitely, maybe, live forever (though I would argue "Whatever" might have made for a better title). In addition to "DLBiA", I also reread "Mysterious Days" (the Bono one), "Here's Johnny", and "Cultural Betrayal". The nugget of most interest to longtime TOA readers is that my joke of giving most books three out of four in my reading reviews came from the novella in this collection, where the film critic protagonist is in a habit of giving all movies two out of four ratings.
Like with the above, I would recommend this book to anyone who is already familiar with the author. I think what you get from the reading is based solely on how much work you want to put into extending Klosterman's points, which sometimes don't seem to have any point at all. The way I look at it is that Klosterman has a certain skill for reframing the obvious so that it sticks with you, but some readers may miss this trick because they assume they knew it all along as soon as they see it, forgetting that they never could have articulated the point themselves without the prompt of the reading. For example, I think most people would agree that being good is more important than being liked, but most of what I hear about foreign perception centers around America's approval rating rather than an honest assessment of our actions. Another example is the insight that technology has created the free time for self-absorption, which is something that a lot of people struggle with, yet I usually hear blame given to the technology itself rather than our inability to deal with the resulting free time.
The note that I will take with me from the reading is the thought that the insistence on being right is at the core of America's issues. This is a particularly relevant consideration at a time when so much debate is centered around uncertain issues. In the American culture, there is a tendency to defend a position as if it's absolutely correct, but in cases where even the experts are unsure it seems like the probable result is dogma instead of productive debate.
