Exhausted. That’s how I feel after reading this book, and I’m someone who loves the Rolling Stones and Keith Richards. Jessica Pallington West has taken a simple (if somewhat dated) concept and turned it into a 240-page monograph. From the title, you might expect a few pages of funny quotes from Richards, presented in a faux Chicken Soup for the Soul type package. It’s a good subject for pokes at the pomposity of the “What Would (Blank) Do” genre.

Instead, West compiles page after page of quotes from Richards, using them to illustrate comparisons to Nietzsche and Rousseau, and includes commandments like “The Construct of the Band is a Model for Interaction.” The first few chapters are heavy going, as the book articulates in endless detail Keef’s “Twenty-Six Ten Commandments” for life and numerous other excursions through Richards minutiae.

If  West had wanted to write a straightforward bio of Richards, that’s cool (she attempts a brief version later on). I can understand her desire to celebrate the iconic, half-drunk, half-stoned interviews that have made Richards such good copy for years. I respect her desire to peel away the buffoonish, blood-transfusing facade to try and get at the real artist beneath, a man who dreamed up the riff for “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” in his sleep.

But West wants to have it all of these ways and ten more: establishing Richards as the basis for a new slacker religion, offering job advice and proposing specific strategies for “Living the Keith Way.” I’m still not certain how much of this is supposed to be funny, and how much of it wants to be taken seriously.

The meat of the book is a hundred-page chunk of quotes from Richards on numerous subjects. They range from the sublime (“Synthesizers and the Internet are things that really should have been kept secret”) to the banal (“For at least five years, undoubtedly, I was the weak link in the chain”) to the disconcertingly racist (“I like hanging out with black people. It’s so much easier.”)

The book is at its best, not during its indiscriminate use of quotes, but in the finally charming chapter six, “Everything You Always (Maybe) Wanted to Know About Keith Richards But Were (Maybe) Afraid to Ask.” Aside from the cloying use of “Maybe” in the title, this chapter hits the dirt in a concise, clear manner, listing everything from his dislikes (Elton John) to his early accomplishments (“Won first fight by using a bicycle chain”).

In the end, I think the reason I’m being so hard on What Would Keith Richards Do? is that I love Keef too. He’s a great artist who’s smarter than he’s given credit for, and his endlessly entertaining life would make great subject matter for a dozen different books. But West takes that all for granted, packing this overstuffed tome with everything and nothing. The man who co-wrote “Gimme Shelter”, “Midnight Rambler” and “Angie” deserves better.