(#9 of 2010) I didn't know much about Russell Brand before beginning My Booky Wook. I mean, I knew about a few controversies, particularly that kerfuffle about him dressing up as Osama bin Laden the day after 9/11, and really that was enough to make me want to read a book about him. It's nuts and gutsy and really kind of impressively off; what's he on about, then? Also he was great in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Also I'm kind of half-assedly reading books that deal with people quitting things because I'm paranoid about my book saying things other already have said. I just want to avoid being a cliché. And I did find something in Brand's book similar to what I'd said in mine—on page 221, he has a sentence talking about how he was a tourist in the land of drugs. So now I have to go into my book to tweak the sentence about being a tourist in the land of drugs. Damn it.
Other than that I was pleasantly surprised. If I was to draw a graph that mapped my enjoyment of the book it would look a bit like a bell curve pushed slightly to the right. The beginning's a drag. Brand seems slightly bored recounting his youth in the English city of Essex. He's chubby, his parents are divorced, his mom has cancer, things suck. Then, blam, on page 89 he has a minor role in a school play. It's his first performance, and the experience electrifies him as well as the book's writing. From then on it's Brand getting famous plus lots of drugs and sex, and who doesn't love a good Horatio Alger story with lots of drugs and sex?
It's better than that. While there aren't a lot of scenes, Brand's voice is great. Reading this is a bit like reading Money written not by Martin Amis but by John Self him, er, self. Brand's life before he quit the heroin and crack is something out of an early Amis novel. And Brand is a gifted storyteller. When I read I scrawl notes in the front cover. Usually the notes are good lines the author's written, or good stories. But for whatever reason, for much of this book I didn't have a pen with me, and so I folded the pages over. At one point I folded down four pages in a row. Other times I did have a pen, and my quick notes may give you some flavour of the book: "p. 213: Gay night pantsless. p. 215. great heroin description. p. 217: gravity: 'Newton's implacable adversary.' p. 230: kicked off airplane, anus full of heroin, security gives him a hug."
Brand sounds like he's more fun to read about than be around. In one story, an ambulance arrives while he's in the midst of some self-destruction and he whips off a line about "usually by the time the ambulance arrives... I'm generally feeling pretty upbeat." Spoken like someone whose had many ambulances called on him. And then, once Brand quits the heroin and the crack, he once again grows bored with his story. But that doesn't happen until the very end. While Brand is on the drugs, the book's more entertaining than most celebrity autobiographies. I have no idea how much of this Brand wrote himself. There are many middling famous self-obsessed entertainers, but few of them are willing to write about themselves with any semblance of honesty. Brand seems to, and his story's worth reading not just for its accounts of debauchery. It also contains its share of insights into fame, ambition and the nature of performance. There's also a fair bit on his creative process.
One last thing... You know how at the beginning of the year I said I would concentrate on reading books? I'm realizing that reading well is a habit. Reading books is getting easier. The more I'm reading, the more I want to read. It's kind of fun.
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