Stuff Hipsters Hate: A Book About Hate That I Also Hated!

A Review By: Amelia

Hipsters are a trend that we in the twenty-first century just can’t seem to get rid of. Their numbers have exploded in the last few years from a few disillusioned twenty-somethings that thought they were better than everyone else, to a nation of disillusioned twenty through forty somethings who think they’re better than everyone else! But what do we really know about them other than they work as baristas and claim to have ‘been into that’ before anyone else? This book, Stuff Hipsters Hate, stakes out to educate the non-hipsters.

Stuff Hipsters Hate is an insider’s take down of the two author’s own subculture–hipsterdom. The blog Stuff Hipsters Hate has been deconstructing this often-mocked subculture that’s known for its their wide-reaching disdain for most things.

The authors of this book are Brenna Ehrlich and Andrea Bartz and, as you might have guessed, they also run the Stuff Hipsters Hate blog. They are hipsters themselves, so I just had to trust they knew what they were talking/mocking about.

The plot of Stuff Hipsters Hate is right there in the title–it’s stuff hipsters hate. It’s laid out like a scientist’s field journal in chapters with sections, charts, diagrams, and pictures. It includes statistics and observations as if the hipsters were a hardly studied primate society and not just douchebag twenty-somethings that are too smug for their own good. Oops, is my unbiased hate towards hipsters showing again? Oh well, we’re almost down here.

I’m kind of torn on this book. On one hand, it’s about hipsters and I hate hipsters (at least, the hardcore ones) so reading this was a bit of a chore. On the other hand, it’s about mocking hipsters (I love doing that) so that made me want to keep reading. It was all very conflicting. Now that I’ve finished the book and am reviewing it, the charm of mocking hipsters has worn off–and quickly!

My final thoughts on Stuff Hipsters Hate are that as far as this blog-to-book goes, Stuff Hipsters Hate is average. Two stars out of five stars at most. I got some laughs from this book, and it was a pleasant surprise how unblog-like this book was, but like any online blog/forum/Tumblr page etc., it is way better in small doses on the internet, not ‘I’m going to sit and read for a few hours’ portions. Especially since the topic is hipsters and haven’t we all had enough of this ridiculous trend yet?