Saturday, January 28, 2012

Book 10: Playing the Game

Playing the Game by Belle de Jour is the novelization of her life. After reading the actually diary Secret Diary of a Call Girl and Confessions of a Working Girl, I felt that this book was the biggest disappointment in this genre. It wasn’t bad but I just didn’t fully get sucked in.
This book is one of other books written by Belle De Jour. I was looking forward to reading this book since I enjoyed the other book by Belle so much. It was so much and entertaining. So I had really high hopes for this book. Maybe my hopes were too high.
The book read a lot like the secret diary. So it made me wonder where the novelization was occurring and where it ended. But it failed to have the more fun aspects of her personality. It was a duller form of Belle. I would have loved a bit more tips and more lists (not the top ten lists at the end of each month/chapter). The book took on the pitfall of many of my stories, putting too much of myself into the main character and thus making it harder for others to truly connect since it doesn’t feel like fiction nor does it feel like true diary.
I had issues with the formatting. It was as if she was trying too hard to do two things at the same time: keep the diary formatting and push along the plot. There were several times where events that normally would have happened in one day were split up into two or there especially the over analysis of fairly trivial things that you would only think for a day, not multiple days. Then as the book went on, there were more and more typos which really didn’t help things.
But in the end the book didn’t hit my sweet spots. Watching her go from escorting to the civilian world wasn’t exciting. You saw her go from carefree to paranoid to sullen and then almost unwilling to become a courtesan. Which made no sense, why was she so skeptical of the idea? It was never clear. It was almost as if she was trying to live up to the rouse that she should be careful and skeptical rather then wanting to go for the sex with money with a guy she was into and lacking the pitfalls of a relationship (after months of failing to find a real beau again).
So yeah, I was disappointed with Playing the Game. It was just an okay book. But after reading other goodies from the same author, I was hoping for more of the same but when put into a fictional world. I judge fiction harsher then non-fiction. 


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