Life And How To Live It

Excerpt from Patton Oswalt’s Zombie Spaceship Wasteland featuring Michael Stipe

As a consumer you have three options in terms of buying and experiencing Patton Oswalt’s new book Zombie Spaceship Wasteland. I am telling you right now: Unless you are deaf, there is a correct choice to be made. You have to buy the audiobook.

If you buy Zombie Spaceship Wasteland for your Kindle or some other similar device, you’re getting the bare minimum experience. I cannot recommend this unless you are deaf and/or you really love using your Kindle or other similar device. The only positive thing I can say about this experience is that it does not involve paper, shipping, etc and that is good for the environment. But then again, the same is true of downloading an audiobook so that is a shared advantage.

If you buy Zombie Spaceship Wasteland as a physical book, you will have a tactile experience and something you can put on a shelf. I recognize these as generally positive things, and this is certainly my preferred method of consuming books. I’m sure you can get a lot of out a traditional reading experience with this particular book. Oswalt is a fine writer — and not just “for a stand-up comedian,” he is a rather brilliant prose stylist — and the book jacket is a pleasing shade of blue. Also, there is a comic book chapter and comic books are best read on actual paper. That said, you are simply not getting the best possible Zombie Spaceship Wasteland experience in this format. You will be missing something very important.

Patton Oswalt reads the audiobook of Zombie Spaceship Wasteland. This is a major advantage that makes the other formats comparatively irrelevant. Oswalt is one of the great oral storytellers of our era. Why would you pass up the chance to hear his rhythms, cadences, intonation? Why would you not want to hear all that nuance, all the additional asides? The difference between reading this on the page and listening to him speak is like the difference between listening to a great piece of music and reading the sheet music.

This isn’t some guy just reading a book out loud. It’s a true performance and a complete work of art. He takes advantage of the form — a chapter of faux-academic writing about hobo folk songs is complemented by fake field recordings of the songs in question performed by Michael Penn; the opening story in which R.E.M.’s Fables of the Reconstruction pushes Oswalt toward an epiphany that leads him out of his dull life in Northern Virginia includes lyric passages read by Michael Stipe himself. All that, and you get a .pdf of the comic! You can’t lose.

The R.E.M. sequence is brilliant, by the way. I never knew Oswalt was a fan, but from the moment he mentioned Fables, it made perfect sense to me that it would be his favorite. Given the themes in his body of work, how is he not going to love the album about small town loners and a desire for escape?

Buy it from Amazon.