It's good to be jolted out of one's comfort zone now and again.

I suspect that, like me, many readers become a bit tramlined with age and experience.

I hope my tastes are fairly broad, but there's one type of book I never reach for without good reason. ­

Autobiography is a blind spot. The sea of ghost-written memoirs that surges into The Herald's book cupboard each autumn, by celebrities I've never heard of, is in part to blame, but it's not the real reason. Whereas I am fascinated by biography, ­autobiography makes me wary. I always suspect authors of rewriting history, airbrushing foibles and warts as if they were about to grace the cover of Vanity Fair.

There are many exceptions, among them Benvenuto Cellini's autobiography, Muriel Spark's Curriculum Vitae, Laurie Lee's Cider With Rosie, and Maya Angelou's I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. But most of those who set down their own lives often appear to be motivated less by the urge to be scrupulously truthful than the desire to cement a reputation, rebut criticism or score points.

Since the more serious memoirists don't lift their pens until late middle age, these books are intended as a record for posterity. Thus the facts are burnished until they and the writer's halo gleam. Fair enough, but I feel no obligation to swallow their version, any more than I need to listen to a dodgy witness commit perjury in court.

You can imagine, then, with what a heavy heart I picked up The Wolf Of Wall Street, the whiz-bang memoir of rambunctious and obnoxious former Wall Street bond trader and convicted fraudster Jason Belfort. First published in 2008, it has just been reissued to coincide with Martin Scorsese's film of the book, starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

I can't speak for the film, though at three hours it matches the memoir's excessive length. What I can say, though, is that Belfort's so-called cautionary tale, purportedly written to show his children what he was like, is insufferable. Narrated in a manner so wired it's hard to imagine what the man was like when fuelled by industrial quantities of coke and quaaludes, it's a world-class exercise in self-aggrandisement.

Badly written and shockingly repetitive, its only redeeming feature is that, unlike many memoirists, Belfort is hellbent on showing himself in the worst possible light, as a cheat, liar and sex addict. The novelty of this worm's eye view quickly fades when it becomes clear that Belfort revels in depicting his excesses. There's not a morsel of real guilt for the lives he's ruined that I could detect.

None of that would matter, not in the least, if this was a well-written book. But it's not. In his hands, a career of eye-watering decadence, deceit, scandal and sleaze becomes tedious and dull. That's some feat.

Predictably, even before the public has seen it, Scorsese's movie is making headlines, accused of glorifying rather than condemning Belfort's behaviour. The New Yorker's film critic David Denby was scathing, writing: "It's meant to be an expose of disgusting, immoral, corrupt behaviour, but it's made in such an exultant style it becomes an example of disgusting, obscene filmmaking."

Denby has a particularly sharp axe to grind against Wall Street's wolves, having been savaged by them himself. American Sucker, his account of his descent into stock exchange lunacy, is apparently terrifying, showing just how low an intelligent man can be brought by the need for a quick return on his investment.

When his marriage collapsed, Denby plunged into the dot-com bubble in order to buy his wife's share of their home. The result was disastrous. His account of this shaming episode, says one reviewer, is "bracingly honest". He is also a very good writer. On both counts, American Sucker has earned its place on my pile of must-reads.

Meanwhile, The Wolf Of Wall Street is howling in the dark of the broom cupboard, kept company by the toilet duck, and awaiting a trip to the pound.