Confessions of a Conjuror

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Fascinating, wide-ranging and amusing (commuters who suffer from embarrassing giggle-outbursts on buses and trains, beware!) - I really enjoyed this. His understanding of feelings and motivations e.g. when stepping into a lift while someone inside steps out only to realise it is the wrong floor, and reactions of both parties are identifiable and amusing.

he also admits, “means nothing.” For Brown, this is not a cause for despondency. His punters experience “surprise and delight”, and the “trivial nature of the variables is irrelevant”. And that, it seems, is the message of this strange, postmodern book. Brown elevates seemingly insignificant moments in his life and imbues them with drama. “To really know someone,” he suggests, is to “gently trace their dreamy associations”. He may be right. In Confessions of a Conjuror, Brown takes us on a meandering pleasure cruise downriver. It is worth the journey.””

Surely this is a joke, I thought to myself. Surely, at some point in this book Derren Brown is going to write "Gotcha! Can't believe you read so much drivel, here's the real story,". It's so bad that by 10% into the book, I was convinced it was some kind of practical joke; a set up for some convoluted mind f*** that Derren Brown was about to reveal, but no, this is just a mindblowingly boring selection of boring random and boring thoughts that are boring, boring, boring. Did I mention that this is boring? I only thing that surprised me about this book was that I had this expectation that due to Derren's knowledge of the mind and psychology he would have some profound insights into our nature and know some secrets as to how we can increase our personal power. I don't want to use the word disappointed because that's not fair.

From the start, he declares that it is the minutiae of life which reveals the person which he puts into practice to reveal himself and we are granted a dip into his thought processes. It was this third section which was less captivating. It was brilliant, funny, and very interesting in small, but some of the time it did run on a bit. My captivation did go through phases of waning about halfway to two thirds of the way through book, though it did return later. Blimey, he's so pompous! / He's clearly bragging but pretending he's casually mentioning something." Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Old_pallet IA18103 Openlibrary_editionAs with the idea that psychics use Barnum statements that appear to be very personal and accurate statements about you but would actually apply to most people, I would say that most of the ideas and experiences told in here are similar in that they are obviously very personal things about Derren himself but most of it will apply to everyone in some respect.