Book review - Wreck This Journal by Keri Smith

For Christmas this year I received This Is Not A Book (affiliate link) by Keri Smith, which I discovered when I was putting together my Day Zero Project list. I wrote about it on the blog here, and I've been enjoying working my way through it. When I saw an opportunity to review another book in the series by Keri Smith - Wreck This Journal (affiliate link) - I had to apply.

Wreck This Journal is a paperback book containing a series of creative prompts which invite you to destroy, or at the very least inflict significant damage upon, both individual pages and the book as a whole. It's a difficult process for someone like me that loves books and enjoys looking at a shelf of pristine volumes. But once you've got yourself started, it's fantastic to engage with the creative process and also have a lot of fun! This is the book in its pristine state:

And this is it a couple of weeks later, with plenty of the book left to complete!

So far I have:

Poked holes in a page with a pencil, torn out a page and crumpled it up, used a page as a cup to drink from, stuck in labels from fruit, dripped in paint and closed it to create a print, glued in newspaper, stuck in postage stamps, broken the spine, glued in random items I found round the house, rubbed it against our dirty car, decorated a page with tape and come up with a list of even more ways to wreck it!

Probably the biggest challenge for me was taking the book with me into the shower. I didn't cheat and it got nice and wet, fortunately it has dried out a bit and it's not yet completely ruined!

It all sounds a bit silly, and perhaps it is, but I've certainly had a lot of fun with Wreck This Journal. The simple prompts don't take long to carry out, and they can be interpreted as literally or as creatively as you wish. I'm intending to complete as much of it as I can, so look out for a future post featuring a photograph of an even more wrecked book! I'm also intending to have a look out for some of other books by Keri Smith.


I received this copy of Wreck This Book to review, but it's been on my wish list for a while!