Play it Again only work as a book if you believe a) the G Minor Ballade is really quite hard, and b) I was really quite a bad pianist.  "Good pianist tackles easy piece" is not such an interesting idea. 

Judge for yourself from the book - or from this little film - how hard you think the piece is. Anything Murray Perahia, Emanuel Ax and Noriko Ogawa  have night sweats about is hard enough for me. 

But was I any good to start with?