Sample Saturday: Nerd Do Well by Simon Pegg

So, I’m test driving a new meme for Bryan’s Book Blog and I’m calling it Sample Saturdays. As you may or may not have noticed around here, I’ve become enamored with my Kindle and I am especially in love with the Sample feature. If you don’t already know, the basic idea is that through Amazon, you can send the beginning of any eBook to your Kindle, free of charge, in order to get a feel for the book. I have used this feature to death on my Kindle, so much so in fact, I currently have 255 unread samples on my Kindle. They have been a great help in choosing which books to move to my Wish List to eventually purchase and download, and which books to avoid like the plague … and there have been more than a few which I have chosen to ignore and never read again.

So, what I plan on doing for Sample Saturdays is choosing a Kindle sample I have read during the week, and do a run-through here including the publisher info, a sample from the beginning of book and then a quick reaction including whether or not I’ve decided to save it to my Wish List to purchase at a later date or send it to the trash heap.

Nerd Do Well: A Small Boy’s Journey to Becoming a Big Kid
by Simon Pegg

(New York: Gotham Books, 2011)
Kindle eBook, 368 Pages, 490 KB, Autobiography
ASBN: B004RKXO1Q, US$12.99

Sample: “FORWORD Hello, North America. Welcome to a very special edition of Nerd Do Well and to a foreword I am writing just for you. This isn’t in the original British version of the book, which is a good thing because the whole ‘Hello, North America’ salute would be lost on them, or else they might assume I was being ironic and making a comment about how North American culture has had such an influence over our own; we have become a sort of miniature facsimile of it, aping its cultural ephemera like an aspirational younger sibling. Ironic in itself considering Britain is culturally ancient and collectively cynical whilst contemporary North American society is relatively young and brash like a teenager: full of opinions, optimism and self-confidence.

“A confused metaphor, I know, but it explains our respective attitudes toward sarcasm and irony. I often find myself irked by my countrymen when they snootily insist that North Americans don’t ‘do’ irony. This simply isn’t true; there is a rich vein of dry and ironic humo(u)r which permeates the North American cultural output. The difference is simply a social one and I believe it goes back to the relative ages of our respective nations.”

My Reaction: I have always been a big fan of Simon Pegg’s work—Spaced, Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, Doctor Who, Mission: Impossible, Star Trek, etc.—so when I saw that he had written an autobiography, I knew it was something that I was going to want to read. After diving in to Nerd Do Well’s sample, I found that it was pretty much what I had expected: smart, self-deprecating, humble, and absolutely hilarious. I want to finish reading it because Pegg is such an engaging writer, but I don’t know if it is something that I want to pay $12.99 for. It’s not at my local library, and so the only way that I am going to get to be able to finish reading this book would be to pay for it and again, I’m not sure I want to do that. At some point, I probably will, but the bottom line is that Nerd Do Well is not moving straight to the top of my Kindle Purchase List, but I am saving it to my Wish List so I can remember it when the time comes.