Patton Oswalt‘s new book Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life From an Addiction to Film hit shelves yesterday, and the wintery evening brought Oswalt together with John Hodgman in New York City for a talk on the book and more laughs than were really countable at Barnes & Noble. The book chronicles Oswalt’s coming of age as both a performer and writer in the ’90s all while watching a collection of classic films so extensive that more than one joke was made about the length of the book’s appendix. It includes all of the movies and the dates on which he saw them.

Between anecdotes about long double-features on weekdays and whole weekends spent at the cinema, Hodgman jested that he’d never seen more than one classic movie. The overarching theme of the evening, aside from cinematic wonders, was creation. Oswalt told the audience that every artist has a stage – an important one – of consuming culture. At some point, that consumption will reach peak saturation and the artist will need to switch to actually putting something of their own creation out into the world. His stage of consumption was mostly in those movie theaters in the ’90s, and it helped make him the performer he is today.

If you get the chance to catch any future stops on this book tour, I highly recommend you take it. While the other half of the talk may not be as incredible as John Hodgman (who am I kidding – you know who ever Patton gets up on stage with will be great), you are in for an excellent time, the chance to ask Oswalt some questions, and you’ll walk away with a good new book to read.

Go get that book! Come back here and tell us what you think of it as soon as possible. That’s what comment threads are for!

Image via USAToday