Chuck Klosterman Presents Chuck Klosterman X: The Audio Companion to a Highly Specific and Defiantly Incomplete History of the Early 21st Century by Chuck Klosterman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Ahha! Meagan showed me how to review more than one version of the same book.
What you need to know about Chuck Klosterman Presents Chuck Klosterman X: The Audio Companion to a Highly Specific and Defiantly Incomplete History of the Early 21st Century is that it truly is an audio companion to the book. It’s not the book read aloud, but it’s a summary of the book and some readaloud snippets. As Klosterman puts it, if you listened to the audio, you’d be able to talk about this book at a party or something without having to actually read it.
It’s kind of great, but it was also kind of a letdown. When I first started listening, I realized that it worked a lot better if you’d read the book. Or, if you like Klosterman, like I do, you’re going to want to read the entirety of the book rather than get the summary.
So I switched to the print, then went back to the audio.
The audio is also excellent. And it’s something that I like here and there, an audiobook that offers something other than a straight readaloud of the book. It’s almost like Walking Dead comics and the TV show. The show follows the same(ish) characters from the comics through similar scenarios, but things tend to go down in different ways. Which means that gigantic fans can experience both, but casual fans can do one or the other.
Am I throwing down the gauntlet and saying that you’re not a huge Klosterman fan if you don’t do both? Yes. Yes I am. As the man himself says, it’s better to have one person love you than to have 10 people who like you. According to some very bad math, I’m better than 10 of you (at least in this one specific way). And isn’t that really why any of us do anything? To be better than all the other losers out there?