Up till now: the autobiography - William Shatner

I'm starting with a book review of possibly the worst book I have ever read - it's certainly the worst biography (although to be fair I don't read that many). Which is a shame as William Shatner has had quite interesting and varied acting roles throughout his career, and worked quite hard at it.

Maybe he's showing his age. It's a completely self-indulgent book, with a confused timeline and random ideas. It starts by Shatner telling us all the ideas he had considered and discarded for his opening chapter and why he'd discarded them. All of them, in detail. And you can't quite help thinking even from the beginning that this book is all about showing off as much as possible about what he's done and why he thinks people love him.

A recurring construct throughout the book is to deliberately stop halfway through a sentence to pick up a previous idea that he left with an elipse in a previous paragraph (or chapter sometimes). This is a bad thing, in case I didn't make that clear.

But the most distressing thing is how he uses quotes and comments from former colleagues to show them off to a disadvantage, always with the undercurrent that he's better than them. He claims to not have had any idea (for the last 40 years) just how much his Star Trek colleagues hated him. But then maybe that's just self-confidence, which is ultimately what makes a good actor.

In short, he thinks he's hilarious, and while I think he's a good actor, comic genius he ain't. Is it harsh to say that he's better when he's pretending to be someone else?