Category 12: A celebrity memoir
Nerd do Well
Author: Simon Pegg
Publisher: Arrow
Publisher: Arrow
Published: February 24, 2015 (first published January 1, 2009)
Page count: 368
Genres: nonfiction, autobiography, comedy
Page count: 368
Genres: nonfiction, autobiography, comedy
Date read: December 27, 2018
Number of times read: 1
Format: paperbackSource: OwlCrate
Summary
Zombies in North London, death cults in the West Country, the engineering deck of the Enterprise: Simon Pegg has been ploughing some bizarre furrows in recent times. Having blasted onto the small screens with his now legendary sitcom Spaced, his rise to nation's favourite son status has been mercurial, meteoric, megatronnic, but mostly just plain great.
From his childhood (and subsequently adult) obsession with Star Wars, his often passionate friendship with Nick Frost, and his forays into stand-up which began with his regular Monday morning slot in front of his 12-year-old classmates, this is a joyous tale of a homegrown superstar and a local boy made good.-- via Goodreads
Zombies in North London, death cults in the West Country, the engineering deck of the Enterprise: Simon Pegg has been ploughing some bizarre furrows in recent times. Having blasted onto the small screens with his now legendary sitcom Spaced, his rise to nation's favourite son status has been mercurial, meteoric, megatronnic, but mostly just plain great.
From his childhood (and subsequently adult) obsession with Star Wars, his often passionate friendship with Nick Frost, and his forays into stand-up which began with his regular Monday morning slot in front of his 12-year-old classmates, this is a joyous tale of a homegrown superstar and a local boy made good.-- via Goodreads
Review
Some parts of this book really, really annoyed me. The "comic" interlude, for example, the story about the adventures Simon's alter-ego and his android companion Canterbury? So goddamned annoying and I could have easily, easily done without that 'story'. I put the word story in quotes there because it's clearly just there as filler and fluff and fanservice. It's barely a story being more of a self-indulgent male fantasy and making no apologies about it. Don't get me wrong it had its funny bits and the reveal of the villain and his motivation was clever, but it was sexist, crass, and stupid and should have been edited out of the first draft. The adventures of Simon and Canterbury take up 62 pages out of 368, that's 67% of the bloody book which means there's more of that damn adventure than there is actual memoir content and now that I've actually calculated that I am angry! As a nerd, who very much enjoys Simon Pegg and the films I've seen him in (and the work I plan to seek out from learning about it in this book) I think I am the target audience for this book. But I must be wrong because with two-thirds of the book being a sex-fuelled sexist romp with his "dashing" alter-ego this book seems very much targeted to male nerds who are into comedy, horror and scifi (because of course, it is those genres themselves tend to be pretty sexist in their fandoms sadly...). Another way this book comes off as exclusionary is some of the ways Pegg phrases things. I remember saying to a couple of my friends in late November when I was still only a short way into the book that I was pissed off at Pegg for the way he'd generalised his experience to be the same experience that "everyone" has while at the same time claiming to be really open towards marginalised groups, many of whom probably did not experience things that way. This was mainly in reference to a time where he said that everyone goes through that stage where they exploratorily play doctor with members of the opposite sex as children and explore each other. Yeah, that's not an experience I ever had as a child and you implying that I clearly should have because "everybody" does just makes me annoyed at your book sir and then by extension at you.
Other things that annoyed me were how much this damn book jumped around. I'm actually really mad at Ben Dunne at Century for the things he let slip through the editing process. It's all over the place with early anecdotes telling me he'll get to certain points related to them later in the book, but by the time you get to that part of the book you've completely forgotten the reference because of Simon and Canterbury's adventures and because you've gone through about twenty other topics and anecdotes since then. And Pegg's use of pseudonyms for some people in his life doesn't make that easier. He mentioned that he was calling one girl Eggy Helen early on in the book but said that he wasn't going to talk about her until later. By the time he finally got to Eggy Helen, I couldn't for the life of me remember what he'd originally said that caused him to bring her up so far in advance of her actual significance...
The book got better later into it once Pegg started talking about his career and his personal life from University up to the book's present of 2009. He talks about the movies and TV shows he's worked on and the connections he's made within his Hollywood network and what that's been like for him having grown up a nerd and idolising some of the people he's now working alongside. The latter half of the book is much tighter and more coherent. Which makes a certain amount of sense as those are more recent memories and experiences rather than things he is trying to recall clearly from childhood. He spends a good deal of the first half of the book rambling and shambling through anecdotes trying to tie them together into a linear series of events that shaped him into the man he was at the time of writing this book in 2009. The times when he does film analysis are the best; he's incredibly good at analysing films, which I now know makes sense given his educational background. He also mentions Carrie Fisher quite a bit throughout due to having had a decades-long crush on her before he finally got the chance to meet her. I feel like saying without a doubt that the memoir of hers that I read last year was so much better than this one. This one really was just mediocre. It needed a lot more in the way of editing.
Do you like Simon Pegg? What celebrity memoirs have you read?
Other things that annoyed me were how much this damn book jumped around. I'm actually really mad at Ben Dunne at Century for the things he let slip through the editing process. It's all over the place with early anecdotes telling me he'll get to certain points related to them later in the book, but by the time you get to that part of the book you've completely forgotten the reference because of Simon and Canterbury's adventures and because you've gone through about twenty other topics and anecdotes since then. And Pegg's use of pseudonyms for some people in his life doesn't make that easier. He mentioned that he was calling one girl Eggy Helen early on in the book but said that he wasn't going to talk about her until later. By the time he finally got to Eggy Helen, I couldn't for the life of me remember what he'd originally said that caused him to bring her up so far in advance of her actual significance...
The book got better later into it once Pegg started talking about his career and his personal life from University up to the book's present of 2009. He talks about the movies and TV shows he's worked on and the connections he's made within his Hollywood network and what that's been like for him having grown up a nerd and idolising some of the people he's now working alongside. The latter half of the book is much tighter and more coherent. Which makes a certain amount of sense as those are more recent memories and experiences rather than things he is trying to recall clearly from childhood. He spends a good deal of the first half of the book rambling and shambling through anecdotes trying to tie them together into a linear series of events that shaped him into the man he was at the time of writing this book in 2009. The times when he does film analysis are the best; he's incredibly good at analysing films, which I now know makes sense given his educational background. He also mentions Carrie Fisher quite a bit throughout due to having had a decades-long crush on her before he finally got the chance to meet her. I feel like saying without a doubt that the memoir of hers that I read last year was so much better than this one. This one really was just mediocre. It needed a lot more in the way of editing.
Do you like Simon Pegg? What celebrity memoirs have you read?
Overall Rating
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| 2.5 bolts |
Can't stand Simon Pegg so this doesn't surprise me in the slightest. I haven't read a memoir for ages actually.
ReplyDeleteI enjoy the movies he's been in but after reading this I'm really not sure I like *him* specifically. I don't read many memoirs, and I probably wouldn't have picked this one up myself but it did come in a subscription box.
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