Salacious. Bawdy. Hilarious.
Yes, Russell Brand is known world-wide as a stand-up comedian and an actor, and I’m finding that folks either love him or hate him. Me? I have been brought to laughter many times when watching him on the screen. In my one brush with celebrity, I also blushed like a schoolgirl when I met Russell Brand late last winter and his hilarity was right in front of my face. (Literally very, very close to my face… read more here if you’d like.) In print form, I expected Brand to continue to crack me up with the recent release of Booky Wook 2: This Time It’s Personal in paperback. Much laughter ensued, that’s for sure.
Trust me when I say that the title doesn’t lie, for Brand let’s it all hang out in this memoir. As I haven’t read it, I cannot compare the content of this memoir to his first My Booky Wook, but I did have the feeling I was going to be exposed to a lot of personal details of Brand’s life when I picked this one up. No doubt about it, he writes very frequently about his wild lifestyle, and though the years chronicled here are drug-free for him, he’s still partying it up in lots of other ways. One might even suggest that his strongest addiction is to women and sex, and there’s a lot of that within these pages, though only a few passages offer any specifics, and even those are told more in a humorous than a “steamy” manner. (One particular passage near the end of the book managed to cause simultaneous guffawing and shuddering for me.)
Booky Wook 2 is undoubtedly told in Brand’s signature voice, causing no questioning about who actually wrote this celebrity memoir. Fans of Brand shouldn’t be surprised by the incredibly intelligent lexicon that comes so naturally in his writing, though it’s an odd experience to keep a dictionary nearby when reading a comedian’s memoir. I found myself appreciating his storytelling ability, even if I was shocked by the content of some of his stories. Only in the final pages does the future Mrs. Russell Brand, the fiery Katy Perry, make an appearance, and it’s quite a lovely way to bring these chapters of his life to an end, by indeed meeting his match.
Dawn occasionally indulges in some fluff reading when she’s not busy being a teacher or a mommy. When she can spare a moment or two, she blogs away at my thoughts exactly.