Charlie Pickering once said writing an autobiography is like ‘bringing yourself to climax into a rolled up picture of yourself’. Simon Pegg may well agree. In fact, he starts his own autobiography by admitting as much. This goes some way to explaining why Nerd Do Well, while being an excellently satisfying bio for any Pegg fan to read, is filled with mildly annoying moments of ‘I’m not going to tell you about this event, it’s private’ which does make you wonder: why bring it up in the first place.

You get the impression that the primary reasons Pegg agreed to write the book are to a) have an amount of control over what the public need to know about his private life (even in the biography he is very tight-lipped about his life now and good on him for it) and b) to… well… basically nerd out over Star Wars and his film and comedy influences. Which is fine, that’s exactly what we want!

The nerdstalgic reminiscing and the Star Wars lectures that make up the bulk of Nerd Do Well are cleverly broken up by ‘The Adventures of Simon Pegg’ (Now available as a graphic novel app – buy it). The story of super hero/super handsome sex expert Simon Pegg and his robot butler/best friend Canterbury. These short little (fiction) chapters make for a nice little spoonful of sugar when the Star Wars theory gets a little heavy.

Essentially Nerd Do Well is a celebration of Nerd. Anyone who’s ever felt slightly embarrassed over connecting with a simple movie in a personal and strangely powerful way (whether it be Star Wars or in my case recently Scott Pilgrim vs. The World); anyone who has experienced the wonder and joy of ‘discovering’ a new TV show and spent the next year talking entirely in quotes from it (Simon Pegg’s Spaced for me, The Young Ones for Simon); anyone who has ever gone to any kind of scifi/fantasy convention and had that feeling of relief because you’ve finally found your people. You need to read this book. Because the Geek shall inherit the Earth. And it starts with Simon Pegg.