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Nerd Do Well (2010)

by Simon Pegg(Favorite Author)

3.63 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

1846058112 (ISBN13: 9781846058110)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Century

review 1: I love Simon Pegg's movies - that was what attracted me to his autobiography 'Nerd Do Well', that and its hilarious title. However, whilst a pleasing read, something about it fell short for me. Pegg's writing style is exactly how you would expect: Fun. It has witty prose with amusing asides and digressions. But it was the digressions that made this book difficult to swallow. Pegg will tell anecdotes from his childhood and that will remind him of a story from his adulthood and explain how that shaped his career - usually this would be fine and a fantastic structure, however all too often the anecdotes would have little bearing on his career, except perhaps on an emotional level - but on the whole that passed me by and the main issue I had with how Pegg delivered this struct... moreure was that it slowed the paced down almost unforgiveably. This dawned on me when I I was over two thirds through the book and realised he hadn't even left school yet. Given Pegg's penchant for self awareness and 'rhyming' jokes in his movies, I believe this was the best way to structure the book but the emphasis of his anecdotes were in the wrong place for example, I learnt almost as much about Pegg's teenage sex life as I did his inspirations for his work. This book had a real issue with filler material.An odd, and strangely genius approach, to not having nearly enough material for the book was by inserting a an episodic story about a fictionalised Simon Pegg who lives a James Bond/ Bruce Wayne lifestyle and is accompanied by an android side kick solving mysteries and sleeping with beautiful women all around the world. For a story which was so obviously filler it was actually really bloody good - and reminded me why I like Pegg so much. In fact, I'm going to share just those parts with a struggling student of mine who writes similarly immature fiction. Another excellent part of the book was a film theory based analysis of some historical Science Fiction films which was a joy to read - I would have loved to read a lot more of his opinions and perspectives on various realms of geekdom. It was also very interesting learning about how he transitioned between comedian and actor at various points in his life 'Nerd Do Well' was, all in all, a very entertaining read, however, considering the actual amount of content, it took an awful long time to get through.
review 2: This was surprisingly intellectual (big words, deeply analytical, sometimes reads like a college essay) for what some might expect from Simon Pegg. Chapters are quirkily interspersed with a James Bond-like fiction, but otherwise provides upfront personal history, while hitting the highs and somewhat glossing over the lows ("Run, Fatboy, Run" is not even mentioned). Now I need to re-watch several zombie films. less

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