Customer Reviews
3 or 4 stars? - By: minty, 05 Dec 2008 
In one way i was disappointed with this book, it has to be said out right. In his earlier work, "the Hungry Years" the pages skipped by as you joined him on his odyssey of weight-loss, modern times, and, inevitably, his sober & painful reflections on therapy & childhood. I still find some of it haunting now. At the end he has lost weight & is well on the road to discovery ...
Little BIts of Me ... well it felt like that road got a bit lost. the book has no direction, no manna of weight loss or therapy success. it just felt like quite a lot of inexplicable sadness & loss. also, there was occasional filler, long episodes of movie narrative i found myself skipping.
but it had its strengths too. there is still the force of the writer to be dealt with. his paragraphs on work & the consequential dreary passing of time, I swear it was the truth i have never seen written so clearlyin passing. the truth about when you are young the future is your opponent, when you are middle-aged it is the past, & a much stonger opponent too. much rings true. the taboo of middle age is grappled with - the "falling apart", the physical decline, the prospect of death considered as a reality as never before, & so on.
i had a nagging suspicion monsieur leith did write it a bit as a quick way to make some money , he is fairly open about his financial situation re his concerns with things like getting a mortage, his son's welfare, etc. thoughin a way, i didn't really resent the money therefore, however mulch of a rush job it was. many of his musings were worth 5 episodes of The Times & more. hope he gets to write more, & hope more happiness beckons.
p.s. his description of the financial 'crisis' beckoning, heh, its positively spookily spot-onin its prediction, & another piecein the book worth reading.
More Pieces Than Bits - By: T. Poulter, 23 Aug 2008 William Leith is a journalist & the author of the bestselling book on over-consumption called, The hungry Years,in which his addictions to food, alcohol & everything else were torn apartin minute detail to great acclaim.
I will confess that I had never heard of William Leith nor his previous book until I read several other reviews of his new book, Bits Of Me Are Falling Apart. Immediately I was fasinated to read this book. Firstly, I'm about Leith's age & it sounded as though we shared some common groundin the fact we both feel at that timein life when you are more old than young & things are never going to get better. And secondly, the author of the book I had just bought lived just down the road from me via a couple of villages, so we were off to a good start.
This book could have been written for the fortysomething bloke who may feel washed up &in despair as to what to do next before time runs out. But it is a book for anyone who enjoys reading what a skilled writer can do when they wish to weave their webin a casual & direct way. Of course, Leith has had years of perfecting his art, & his style has been honed to taking the trival & everyday & turning it into wriiten gold.
Leith begins by waking up on a mattressin his office & from then on we are treated to just over two hundred pages of a dayin the life of William Leith & his thoughts on just about everything for the banking system to the state of his left shoulder. This is donein an almost rambling, stream of conciousness style. His body is falling apart, cells are conflicting with each other causing everything to go wrong, & thisin turn is Leith's metaphor for what is happeningin society: everything is falling apart.
From the start Leith tells us all about his particular falling apart & I found he sounded more like a sixty-seven year old suffering from hypochondria rather than a forty-seven year old with the same complaint. Leith must have played hard to end upin this condition & he seems preoccupied with all types of illnesses which he may or may not get.
This of course all adds to the writer's arsenal of material which fellow journalist, the late Jeffrey Bernard used so successfullyin his Low Life columnsin the Spectator magazine. Rather than Bernard, I immediately thought of Simon Gray's diaries when reading Leith's thoughts on the human condition & the way he so brilliantly slides off his subject & on to another & another. If Leith is very, very clever at this then Simon Gray was the ultimate master of it, chewing & mulling over words, paragraphs & then almost throwing them away & then catching them again.
Leith can't quite take away Simon Gray's crown with this book nor has he intended to; he is far too good a writer for that. There is a certain take on a subject that may leave some readers feeling cold & there is a lot of bleakness here as well. Leith's day has the feeling of just coming out of rehab & having to face the outside world again without the booze & drugsin a nervous fractured way.
But if like me you want someone to sum what semi-middle age is all about then they will do no worst than to investigate Leith's thoughts on the subject. I'm glad to have found William Leith but I'm not sure if I like his world. This book is at times too near the truth, & that is why it deserves to be a best-seller.
