I am, I must admit, a bit jealous of Chuck Klosterman. This is why: One of the hazards of the life of a newspaper reporter is that well-meaning people are always asking you when you're going to write a book, as if newspaper writing were some sort of warm-up for the bigger, more meaningful exercise of long-form nonfiction.

I always told these folks that there wasn't anything I could fill an entire book with, but that wasn't entirely true. I could write a hyperintelligent treatise on 1980s heavy metal, examining how the group Cinderella was unfairly lumped in with Poison and bemoaning the lack of attention to the obscure Japanese-American sleaze-metal joint venture called "Cats In Boots." But who would read a thing like that?

Well, all the people who bought Klosterman's debut, Fargo Rock City. It was supposed to be about growing up a rock 'n' roll fan in North Dakota, but it was really just about the metal, like how Cinderella's Take Me Back is the most underrated song on Long Cold Winter.

It generated a cover blurb from Stephen King and a congratulatory e-mail from me. Meanwhile, Klosterman transcended his pop-culture-critic job at the Akron Beacon Journal and moved on to staff writing for Spin magazine, freelancing for The New York Times and producing Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto. I, on the accounting beat at the Rocky Mountain News, keep Denver safe from poor financial reporting.

At this point, you, dear reader, are vaguely irritated that you are more than 300 words into this review and I continue to talk about myself. This is a clue that you may not enjoy Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto, as it views its subject through the prism of Klosterman's life, generally unremarkable - his meteoric rise notwithstanding.

Yet those who can stomach a fair amount of navel-gazing are in for a pop-culture treat, a series of essays that make high-minded points, in a fabulously entertaining way, about "low culture."

Among the author's observations:

• Billy Joel is a genius, despite not being cool, because his most intimate songs - the ones you never heard - perfectly reflect how Klosterman views that very unremarkable life. "I tell people they will understand me better if they listen to Where's the Orchestra? And you know what? They never do. They never do, and it's because they all inevitably think the song is about them."

• Entertainment can ruin relationships. The most tangible example can be found in Klosterman's essay This is emo, a laundry list of the sensitive-male cultural figures that undermine the everyday guy's love life by creating unrealistic expectations. In it, Klosterman's girlfriend (now ex) passes up a weekend in New York with him to fly to Portland to see Coldplay. "I wish I could believe that bozo in Coldplay when he tells me the stars are yellow. I miss that girl. I wish I was Lloyd Dobler."

• MTV's The Real World, designed to reflect reality, now finds reality reflecting it. "Somewhere that relationship became reversed; theory was replaced by practice," Klosterman writes. "During that first RW summer (1992), I saw kids on MTV who reminded me of people I met in real life. By 1997, the opposite was starting to happen; I kept meeting people who were like old Real World characters."

This type of criticism is the logical extension of Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, which broke ground in 1992 not because Michael Madsen's Mr. Blonde sliced off a cop's ear, but because the hoods sat around a diner before the heist debating the true meaning of Madonna's Like A Virgin. The pop-culture obsessives were legitimized; soon, no piece of trivia was too inconsequential for roaring debate.

Klosterman, though, is Tarantino's one true spiritual heir in the field of cultural criticism. Look at the jumble of references in the index for Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs. The "Ps" alone contain two Guns 'N' Roses songs (Paradise City and Patience), the Portland Trail Blazers, and postmodernism. Pornograffitti, the second album from art metal band Extreme, comes before pornography.

And yet, it all hangs together. Klosterman is absolutely convincing when he draws parallel lines between The Empire Strikes Back and Reality Bites in an essay called Sulking with Lisa Loeb on the Ice Planet Hoth. He sums up the future of all Real World cast members succinctly and brilliantly: "You will be the kind of person who suddenly gets recognized at places like Burger King, but you will still be the kind of person who eats at places like Burger King."

Klosterman doesn't try to argue that any of this, in and of itself, is of great importance - the book is purposely called A Low Culture Manifesto - and many critics may think a powerful intellect is wasted on such things. But over the course of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, you can't help but think that this is significant, after all, because all this superficial stuff says a great deal more about us than we realize.

And we can be thankful we have Klosterman to point it out - the kind of person who can write perceptively about The Real World, but still be the kind of person who watches things like The Real World.

David Milstead is a business reporter at the Rocky Mountain News.