by SamGurney » Nov 12th, '10, 01:32
Last week someone who knows me probably too well bought this for me on a whim. After that I really didn't care if they book was 600 pages of waffle, I was incredibly greatful as I think anyone should be who has someone who makes such a kind gesture. Just a passing note for christmas time.
I wasn't able to get stuck in straight away, although I must admit, I had been treated to the VERY sexy harback version of the book and it looked particularly delicious. The aesthetic appeal of the book was the epitome of how unusual the book would be for my tastes- my bookshelf has wedged plenty of cheap, dog-eared, annotated paperbacks on various topics that reveal my propensity for ecclecticism. A book for me is rarley light and I have no other fancy books with painted pages* and I never purchase autobiographies** or the latest Dan Brown*. However***, the book was a nice contrast to my usual read and I hardly even noticed that I was nearly finished.
This type of light reading was refreshing and at times incredibly funny. Parts were very significant and in my opinion had particular literary symbolism. In general, it was a fun escape from the world for the odd couple of minutes when I had nothing better to be doing. The annotations were poorly placed towards the END which is what made them irritating. The rest of them were bearable, but I like a book to have a grand finale- I want the final pages to fly by and it was particularly frustrating to find that I had to read about poached eggs.
The book is quite openly speculations about random things. There are no pretenses it is significant and that you really ought to know it. It is therefore, INCREDIBLY subjective as to whether you might enjoy it, although don't allow negative reviews to colour your judgement- that is up to you and I generally find reviews of things reciprocate and begin to echo each other****
The book sees a departure from Derren's more psychological pretenses and the 'acedemic pretenses' I believe were genuinley Derren being curious about Descartes and Hobbes. There are some touching and incredibly important messages in the book and some wonderful discussions about magic, which the meticulous Derren fan should probably be aware of already from 'Absolute Magic' and 'Pure Effect' .
Perhaps though, as a more 'autobiographical' book- in a contemporary and interesting frame of an effect- it is an invitation into knowing the Derren that lurks beneath the act, on a more open scale.*****
Anyway, the most important thing was that I found the book an anjoyable way to spend some time- parts of it weren't great but parts of it were excellent. That is probably everything I have to say about the book. Oh yes, and he dies in the end. Seriously. Sorry to spoil it.
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*Ignoring the complete 60 or so Sherlock Holmes adventures I have, together in one tome, purchased from the alluring Sherlock Holmes museum in London for an astonishing £15. Strangley enough, one of the things I associate with the Sherlock Holmes museum is Derren's performance on Richard and Judy. For me, a book which is more interested in aesthetics smacks of some of the leather-spined books that furnished the edwardian private 'Libraries' of the archaic, etonian, archetypal scholar- a mental image which has never found appeal, perhaps due to my negative associations when I think of 'upper-class' scholars in general.
**Another mental image which I find quite repulsing in terms of books, is the tepid 'autobiographies' of celebrities which have emerged over perhaps the past decade, as far as I have been aware (not that I could read in the 90s). It evokes corporate hardback, plasticy sleeved, giant books, donning thick pages and a font of around size 70. They all appear to be entitled 'My story' which I can't imagine being well recieved had Orwell pitched his new novels as 'My Story' although, by definition, it was his story. Of course though, this does depend on the extent to which an allegorical tale 'belongs' to someone- in the same way an analogy is the creation and perhaps projection of the promulgator, although the observation of the analogous and creative connection he (or she) has stumbled across. An analogy I might offer is that of discovering a scientific theory- nobody owns gravity, but it can be discovered.
*Such is the extent of my not keeping up in this general stereotype of paperback novels, that I am unawares as to whether or not Dan Brown still writes books. What they were about, I have no idea. Something to do with Pallestine. Personally I much prefer my literary hero 'Noam Chomsky' who fabricates these fantastical stories about how America is actual evil. It's ironic because America is so benevolent and horoic.
*** I do find myself somewhat overusing this word. I once went into a lift. It was embarressing.
****Not that I might at all be suggesting people are liable to conform.
*****I was delighted to discover that Derren, too, cheated on his oral foreign language exams, using his magical knowledge. This is definatley something I have never done. Ever. Although I might have occasionally used sleight of hand to finger palm a folded crib sheet which was a long strip which I folded one fold at a time with a normal hand gesture, glanced down at my allowed '40 words' which I had explained to my teacher, I had written as prompts for what I had to supposedly memorise to justify my incessant glaring at the paper and I gave her my preprepared writing to read throughout as I spoke, to 'check I hadn't missed any parts' which kept her misdirected as she read it whilst I was supposedly reciting my memorised sheet. When I had finished reading my supposedly memorised discourse in a foreign language I refolded it with misdirection into the small square it easily folded into- having been prefolded and crimped so that I palmed it from my pocket facing the correct way- and palmed off the sheet and dropped into my pocket. To excuse the visible shadow, I had snook into the room of the exam at lunchtime before the exam under the guise of preparing my allowed 40 words and checked were I would have to sit relative to her so that the light source did not betray me and make the paper virtually transparent, as happens with a light source from behind you. I then took another official sheet of paper which I was supposed to have written my 40 words on, but had conveniantly forgotten to do so, giving me an excuse to have two sheets in my hand, one of which was folded, giving a triply thick wad of paper concealing my crib sheet.
''To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in another's.'' Dostoevsky's Razumihin.