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3.95 AVERAGE
3.95 AVERAGE
funny
fast-paced
I wasn't even a fan. I've never seen 1 episode of How I Met Your Mother. My younger sister was the Doogie fan. Yet, when I heard he wrote a "choose your own adventure" autobiography, I had to read it. I am now a fan.
Pretty awesome, if not quite legendary. This book has convinced me that Neil and I would get along really well and we should hang out.
Favorite parts:
-the cocktail recipes
-the absurdity
-the "some of us spend time not so much closeted as late-blooming and clueless" coming out story
Favorite parts:
-the cocktail recipes
-the absurdity
-the "some of us spend time not so much closeted as late-blooming and clueless" coming out story
I've loved NPH for a long time, and this book is a fun glance into his life. A bit tricky to do the choose-your-own-adventure style on a Kindle, but worked out just fine in the end (aka I ended up doing a few adventures and then just reading it all the way through so I wouldn't miss anything).
Neil Patrick Harris has led an interesting and entertaining life. I listened to the audiobook. As should be expected, he is a great narrator - full of drama and humor. I didn't love the format - it's told in second person in the format of one of those old "choose your own adventure" books that were popular when I was young. It's still a pretty light-hearted and entertaining listen.
I'm torn about how to review this because it was a lot of fun but in some ways it made me dislike Neil Patrick Harris. I was surprised at how crass some of it was and found that off-putting at first, but I think the genuineness of Harris's love for theatre swung me back towards enjoying it. I also found choosing my own adventure to be very satisfying and was pleased with the story even though I hadn't read the whole book. The choices were good. There was fat-shaming on the very first page and other small things like that that rubbed me the wrong way.
Love NPH! The format was so much fun. Loved reading about a celebrity who had a happy childhood, great loving parents, and is so flippin' sassy!
The stages of reading a Choose Your Own Adventure:
1) Follow one path gleefully to its conclusion.
2) Return to the beginning, and follow another, completely different, path to its end.
3) Repeat until you start getting some choices as repeats and/or you lose track of what choices you've already made.
4) Keep an evergrowing stack of bookmarks beside you so that you can mark a page with choices you haven't made yet and return to it without having to recreate the path you took to get there.
5) Finally feel like you've made every choice you can find, and page through the book reading the few pages you somehow missed.
What a fun read this is. For those of you who are generally linear people, and who crime at the idea of not actually reading a whole book and getting the complete biography, the majority of this book is true autobiography, and it's totally possible to make sure you read the whole thing and have fun while doing so. With some completely ridiculous, hilarious, and obviously untrue sidesteps.
Even the accurate autobiographical parts are written with a great deal of humor and some characteristic irreverence. The book also includes pieces by some famous friends and colleagues.
1) Follow one path gleefully to its conclusion.
2) Return to the beginning, and follow another, completely different, path to its end.
3) Repeat until you start getting some choices as repeats and/or you lose track of what choices you've already made.
4) Keep an evergrowing stack of bookmarks beside you so that you can mark a page with choices you haven't made yet and return to it without having to recreate the path you took to get there.
5) Finally feel like you've made every choice you can find, and page through the book reading the few pages you somehow missed.
What a fun read this is. For those of you who are generally linear people, and who crime at the idea of not actually reading a whole book and getting the complete biography, the majority of this book is true autobiography, and it's totally possible to make sure you read the whole thing and have fun while doing so. With some completely ridiculous, hilarious, and obviously untrue sidesteps.
Even the accurate autobiographical parts are written with a great deal of humor and some characteristic irreverence. The book also includes pieces by some famous friends and colleagues.
When this originally came out, I really wanted to pick it up, but despite seeing a bunch of levitating pics on Twitter around the release date I never did end up getting one.
Then, my local library did this neat thing where after filling out a long questionnaire, one of the librarians would give me a list of book recommendations. This was one of the several books on that list so I decided to finally pick up a copy!
[a:Neil Patrick Harris|620872|Neil Patrick Harris|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1294511797p2/620872.jpg] is an amazing man—I remember watching Doogie Howser, M.D. when I was a kid; I've seen all of How I Met Your Mother and all three Harold & Kumar films; I've seen each of Tony Awards that he's hosted; I follow him on Twitter so I know about David and Gideon and Harper; but I knew there had to be a lot behind NPH that this book would show me.
To read what I liked about this book, go to paragraph A.
To read what I didn't like, go to paragraph C.
To read about some frustrating parts, go to paragraph B.
A) The book is clever in its concept. Who hasn't read a bunch of those Choose Your Own Adventure stories in their childhood? When using this concept with an autobiography, you get to choose what part of the life you want to go to. I did my best to avoid the ending for a while (while at the same time sometimes going down dead ends to get some of the quick "bad" endings out of the way) but I used a pencil to mark off pages I read (I'm a bit OCD so I wanted to make sure I read everything). In classic CYOA mode, I often kept my finger in the book so I could flip back if I chose a bad path.
B) Because my OCD tendencies had me mark off each page as I read them, when I got near the end, I was able to go back and check which paths I didn't follow (to make sure I read everything). Unfortunately, I found five "chapters" that I couldn't get to. Two of these chapters were meant to be "hidden" (e.g. they mentioned how no other page led to this one). Two of them I think were impossible to get to because of typos. The final chapter was an option in one of the two typo chapters (I think the first option on page 23 should reference page 38, not page 39 and the third option on page 110 should reference page 191, not page 194). One other minor frustration was the Cryptic Crossword on page 150. There were several chapters that gave you a chance to flex your mind, but I've never been that good with Cryptic Crosswords. I'm surprised there weren't any instructions (since Cryptic Crosswords are more well known in the UK and aren't too popular in the US) but luckily I've seen them before. While reading the book, I was only able to get about three of the answers. After finishing the book, I had to spend about an hour really attacking the clues to complete the list. But then, when I tried placing the answers into the crossword grid, I found that there was one too few spaces! Technically two of the 4-letter answers could fit in the same part of the grid (neither having any impact on the final answer) but still—weird to create a puzzle without one unique solution.
C) There were some parts of the story I felt were rushed through just because none of the chapters could really be more than a half dozen or so pages. I would have liked more than a short chapter about the Magic Castle (maybe because I'm lucky enough to have gotten inside it, I would have loved to hear more about what he does as President). Also, I think it would have been better as a traditional chronological biography. As I read the book jumping back and forth it was hard to get too invested in his life. NPH is a decent writer (although several chapters were ghost- or obviously-written by friends) but the gimmick was sort of played out after a few chapters.
I'm glad I read it, and I won't hold it against my librarian (after all I did want to read it so it wasn't a bad suggestion, just a slightly disappointing one).
Then, my local library did this neat thing where after filling out a long questionnaire, one of the librarians would give me a list of book recommendations. This was one of the several books on that list so I decided to finally pick up a copy!
[a:Neil Patrick Harris|620872|Neil Patrick Harris|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1294511797p2/620872.jpg] is an amazing man—I remember watching Doogie Howser, M.D. when I was a kid; I've seen all of How I Met Your Mother and all three Harold & Kumar films; I've seen each of Tony Awards that he's hosted; I follow him on Twitter so I know about David and Gideon and Harper; but I knew there had to be a lot behind NPH that this book would show me.
To read what I liked about this book, go to paragraph A.
To read what I didn't like, go to paragraph C.
To read about some frustrating parts, go to paragraph B.
A) The book is clever in its concept. Who hasn't read a bunch of those Choose Your Own Adventure stories in their childhood? When using this concept with an autobiography, you get to choose what part of the life you want to go to. I did my best to avoid the ending for a while (while at the same time sometimes going down dead ends to get some of the quick "bad" endings out of the way) but I used a pencil to mark off pages I read (I'm a bit OCD so I wanted to make sure I read everything). In classic CYOA mode, I often kept my finger in the book so I could flip back if I chose a bad path.
B) Because my OCD tendencies had me mark off each page as I read them, when I got near the end, I was able to go back and check which paths I didn't follow (to make sure I read everything). Unfortunately, I found five "chapters" that I couldn't get to. Two of these chapters were meant to be "hidden" (e.g. they mentioned how no other page led to this one). Two of them I think were impossible to get to because of typos. The final chapter was an option in one of the two typo chapters (I think the first option on page 23 should reference page 38, not page 39 and the third option on page 110 should reference page 191, not page 194). One other minor frustration was the Cryptic Crossword on page 150. There were several chapters that gave you a chance to flex your mind, but I've never been that good with Cryptic Crosswords. I'm surprised there weren't any instructions (since Cryptic Crosswords are more well known in the UK and aren't too popular in the US) but luckily I've seen them before. While reading the book, I was only able to get about three of the answers. After finishing the book, I had to spend about an hour really attacking the clues to complete the list. But then, when I tried placing the answers into the crossword grid, I found that there was one too few spaces! Technically two of the 4-letter answers could fit in the same part of the grid (neither having any impact on the final answer) but still—weird to create a puzzle without one unique solution.
C) There were some parts of the story I felt were rushed through just because none of the chapters could really be more than a half dozen or so pages. I would have liked more than a short chapter about the Magic Castle (maybe because I'm lucky enough to have gotten inside it, I would have loved to hear more about what he does as President). Also, I think it would have been better as a traditional chronological biography. As I read the book jumping back and forth it was hard to get too invested in his life. NPH is a decent writer (although several chapters were ghost- or obviously-written by friends) but the gimmick was sort of played out after a few chapters.
I'm glad I read it, and I won't hold it against my librarian (after all I did want to read it so it wasn't a bad suggestion, just a slightly disappointing one).
You have to read it more than once, there are so many paths!