Book Review No. 13: Join Me

Here's another book that has been sitting on my unread bookcase for much longer than I care to think about; it was on the book shelves in our Reading house and we moved from there over two years ago... I don't know where it came from - it was unread and there was no pencilled price inside or price sticker on the outside. I'm wondering if it was a Christmas present. Hubby, can you remember?!?

Anyhoo, as I explained with the previous book review, I try to take books on holiday that

1) have been sitting on the shelves for too long; and

2) I might not mind leaving behind.

Hence this one got lucky and went on holiday to Spain with us.

The basic premise is that Danny Wallace gets bored one day and wonders how many people he can get to join him simply by putting an advert in a London magazine saying 'Join Me' and asking for a passport photo to be sent to a PO Box. Soon he is receiving letters, emails and photos from all over the globe, proclaiming allegiance to the cause, even though neither he nor anyone else knows what the cause is. He is proclaimed the Leader and people start asking what they have joined up to and what they should be expecting and/or doing. The trouble is, Danny has no clue. And yet still he continues to encourage people to join up, with the ultimate aim of getting to 1,000. Unfortunately, the means to getting 1,000 people to join up just become repetitive - Danny hops on buses, trains and planes to spread the word throughout the UK and Europe, but it's page after page of 'same thing, different country'. And all the time his long-suffering girlfriend is (allegedly) kept in the dark about where he's going and what he's doing, even when that means forgetting (time after time) that he had promised to go out with her while instead he happens to be in Scotland or Iceland.

Do you get the feeling that I didn't really like this book? Well, you're right. I read it through to the end because I was on holiday and knew I could get it read quickly; if I'd been at home I'm pretty sure I would have given up after 50 or so pages with 'life's too short to read bad books' going round in my head. I would probably have liked this book when I was about 20-25 - it would have appealed to the young, fanciful me. But old, sensible me says 'pah' to it. And I certainly won't be reading any others by Danny Wallace, thank you very much. Unless, of course, he's grown up a lot too.