“My life is just a series of embarrassing incidents strung together by telling people about those embarrassing incidents.”
Genre: Memoir —- Comedy
Number of Pages: 339
Perspective: First
Location: England
My Booky Wook is the memoir of actor/comedian, Russell Brand. It details his entire life from a messed-up childhood to making it as an actor to drugged up sexcapades. For a complete summary, you can go here.
I actually really liked reading this book at first. I thought Brand was funny and witty and his voice came through clearly. I could actually hear his (very distinctive) voice as I was reading it. He does warn you from the beginning that he speaks like a British person with no concern for proper grammar. And that is definitely the truth! It hurt my grammar-gut to read some of his lines.
Then there are the footnotes. Oh my God—the footnotes! I have no problem with a properly placed footnote—like in Modern Romance—but this was ridiculous! There were so many footnotes. Every single obscure pop culture reference required a detailed footnote. First of all, I’m a believer that there shouldn’t be that many pop culture references in a book. It dates the book really quickly and deters people from reading it in the future. Also, if the reference is not quickly identifiable and requires further explanation, then it probably does not need to be included in the book. The whole thing was just very distracting while reading.
By about halfway through, I stopped and came back to this book a few months later. I really had to force myself to finish it. It just got to be too long and boring. There were some hilarious stories thrown in there, but you had to sift through all the pop culture references (see above) and childhood stories. Honestly, I just didn’t care about most of what he was saying. He bounced around from story to story with little transition and the only good stories were ones where he was super high and doing something that probably should have gotten him killed or arrested. As far as memoirs go, this was rather unimpressive. I would much rather read I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell any day. At least that drunken asshole tells only his most interesting stories.
P.S. I just found out that there’s a sequel. Dun. Dun. Dun….
If you are interested in buying the book, you can buy it here. After you have read it, leave a comment and let me know what you think!
“Turns out it was mostly a lie. But, at least for a short while, it was a beautiful one.”
2/5 Stars
*****
o Amber Gregg o
