One of the problems I had with this book is that Field's prose is incredibly mundane. The question I kept asking myself was "Why am I taking writing advice from someone who's such a boring writer himself?" It led to the old axiom: "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach." I pegged Mr. Field as one who couldn't, so he's teaching. Another problem was that the book was ludicrously out of date. Two examples of this: 1) his reliance on 'Chinatown' as an example of good screenwriting; it definitely is, but it is also a couple of decades old; 2) the chapter on writing with a computer was unintentionally hilarious; it may have seemed like a good idea at the time, but just like the tacky clothes we all wore in eras gone by, it's best not to look back on it.

But I realized that it wasn't about the style of the prose, or whether Field's own screenwriting was any good, or whether the specifics of his examples were still relevant. He was able to simplify the basic tenets of the screenplay, and give practical and easy-to-follow exercises for overcoming any obstacles. His paradigm of the three-act story structure (which he must have diagrammed at least a million times!) is simple, and yet effective. After first seeing it visually portrayed, many of the pieces of the story that'd been floating around in my own head fell into place. He also gives helpful hints on how to develop character, how to construct scenes and sequences, and how to begin the story itself (you begin by starting with the end!). Maybe his ideas seem obvious to others, but they are a real help to me.

So my rating is not based on the style of the book. It's based on the effectiveness of the teaching. And this book does well in that regard.

Having also read Baxter's Kubrick bio, I think that a brief comparison between the two works is necessary, because it will illuminate some of the mistakes that Baxter makes here.

In dealing with Kubrick, the technique of dividing the man's life up into chapters headed by the film he was working on at the time works perfectly, for Kubrick sometimes spent seven years between films. To say a biographical event is part of the "Full Metal Jacket" years actually denotes a grand period in the director's life. For Woody Allen, a man who has directed a film a year for the last thirty-four years, this technique becomes jumbled easily (some chapters need to be grouped by two or three films, which may not otherwise be connected except that the same funny little man wrote and directed them). And Baxter still manages to confuse the reader regarding chronology of events, even though he has such small periods of time to work with.

That being said, he does a fine job explicating the 'Woody' persona (read "mensch") with Woody the man (read "anti-social, calculating genius"). He never panders to paperback Freud wisdom, just giving cold hard truths about the man.

I tended to enjoy the chapters dealing with the films I most enjoyed (late '70's), and felt a constant sense of doom when dealing with the troubled nineties. Surprisingly, Woody doesn't come off as the villain here. That honour goes to Mia, who is portrayed as a manipulative, scheming, materialistic waif-whore. Woody's foibles are justifiably explained, and maybe rightly so. I mean, he's been warning us about his own foibles for years (for a good precursor to the whole Soon-Yin debacle, see Ike and Tracy's relationship in 'Manhattan'). And I think that that's the strength of Baxter's book: he at once is able to separate Woody's art and life, while showing how they are intrinsically related.

I don't like admitting this to myself (and frankly, I don't like admitting this to all of you out there), but I identified deeply with the main character in David Sedaris' book. And before you start screaming at your computer screen, I know that the main character is David himself, and it's not really a novel, but a collection of humour essays. I see him as a character, because I just can't believe that all of these fantastic stories are true. Is there some truth there? I'm sure. But embellishment seems obvious.

Anyway, back to my first thought. The David in the book is an intellectual snob, verbose and thoughtful, unsure of himself in most ways except his sexuality, but extremely sure that he knows what's best for the world and all its inhabitants. And he's damn funny, too. I can relate to most of that (I'll let you choose what I mean), so getting inside the head of such a witty and conflicted man was a real treat.

The first fifteen 'stories' in the book are well put together pieces on modern life as David sees it. The best of that lot includes "A Plague of Tics" in which David is attacked by a hyperactive form of O.C.D., and "C.O.G.", a wonderful riff on the whole Kerouacian lifestyle gone completely wrong. These first fifteen pieces, however, only form a prelude to some of the best writing I've read in years.

The second last piece, "Ashes", about David's mother's battle with cancer is what good writing should be: humourous and poignant, without ever being melodramatic. He wrings literature from real life, and makes the most of a heartbreaking situation. I can imagine what kind of catharsis it must have been for him.

The last piece (I want to call it the title track), "Naked", is about a trip to a nudist colony. I found myself busting a gut in the middle of a crowded subway car. It is sparkling comedy.

I don't remember how I came across Gogol. But I'm glad I did. The morbid absurdity of these short stories (along with the unfinished "Dead Souls") marks him as a talented writer.

Gogol seems to be able to milk character from mundane situations, but at the same token craft words that have as much to do with Garcia Marquez' magic realism than traditional Russian literature. It is this aspect that at first caught me off guard, but in the end made me fall in love with Gogol's prose.

My two favourites are these:

"The Overcoat", the story of a poor, downtrodden man who saves and saves to buy a fancy new overcoat, but has the whole plan blow up in his face. It is tragedy, but often humourous; sad, but joyous.

"The Nose", which is one of my all time favourite short stories. Gogol manages to turn the story of one man's search for his lost nose (where does he find it? In a cathedral, of course!) into a scathing indictment of Russian caste system. It is wonderfully written and wonderfully absurd, and in the end you just go along with the context Gogol has created, because you trust that this is a writer who knows what he is doing.

For someone with no exposure to Woody's prose, this was a revelation. What a smart writer he is! He manages to find a unique voice, and with this voice he beats his own obsessions to a pulp, until they stand up and say 'Uncle'.

Woody gets even with literary biographies, crime, philosophy (and philosophy and more philosophy), death, religion, intellectualism, political revolutions, psychology, and of course, mimes.

My favourite piece is the last one: 'Mr. Big'. It's a brilliant Raymond Chandler parody, where the blonde bombshell who comes into the private eye's life is not looking for a missing husband, but proof of the existence of God! Ingenious! There's one passage where the detective deduces that since Socrates killed himself, Jesus was murdered, and Neitzche went crazy, then there is someone out there and He doesn't want to be found.

Woody tends to fall back on absurdity for his humour a tad too often (at one point, someone's forehead falls off), and if the collection was any longer it would have gotten tedious. But it's just long enough. Bite sized and tasty.

Tom Robbins' books fall into three categories for me:

I. Pure genius (incl. Roadside, Cowgirls, and Jitterbug)

II. Respectable flights of fancy (Skinny Legs)

III. Lukewarm efforts (Still Life, Frog Pajamas)

That's not to say that all in (I) are five-star champions and all in (III) are horrible one-star waste of times. I've never come across a viable reason to give anything Tom's written less than four-stars (on the Amazon.com scale). Fierce Invalids is no exception. It is a third-tier Robbins book, but that makes it better than 99% of the drek out there.

It's unique (not "most unique") in the Robbins' oeuvre for one simple reason: a male protagonist. Switters is the literary equivalent of a bipolar disorder: he hates organizations, yet is a member of both the CIA and a convent; he believes in laughter as the road to Nirvana, yet he carries a Beretta with him wherever he goes; he's world-wise and pragmatic, yet spends the last two third of the story confined to a wheelchair due to a shaman's curse. This theme of binary opposition runs rampant through the book, and it gives the reader something tangible to hang on to, something Robbins usually is hesitant to do.

Midway through the narrative, I realized that all that I enjoyed about the first half of the book has been destroyed, and I was wondering how Tom would pull it all together in the end (he always does). He does -- although slightly more melodramatic than usual, I was satisfied with the knots he made to tie up the loose ends.

As for his most unique (couldn't help myself here, Tom) ability to wield the swords of simile and metaphor, it has never been sharper. My favourite: "Looking at it from another angle, their kiss was like a paper airplane landing on the moon." It's like haiku, that line.

For the Tom-completist (of which I am a recent member), pick it up and bask in its glory, cause you may not hear a peep from the old man for another five years. For the Tom-newbie, go back to Roadside, and save this one for another day.

William Goldman has said that he told these stories to his daughters, and was then inclined to collect them in one longer prose work. Only he couldn't get turned on by the parts in between the exciting action. The 'boring' parts, as it were. So what does he do? He eliminates the 'boring' parts altogether, by assembling a fictional 'best parts' version of someone else's tale! What a great idea. Sometimes I reveled in the fact that I didn't have to slog through seventy pages of Morgenstern's views on the socio-political history of Guilder and Florin, or how best to plan a royal wedding. It actually made the 'best' parts that much better.

I love Goldman's authorial voice. His pieces for Premiere magazine on the state of the movie industry have always struck me as very wise, common sensical, and conversational. That same voice is utilized to great effect here. The characters you loved in the move have been fleshed out even more, and even though it sometimes proved a distraction when a scene differed from its twin in the movie, sometimes the change (I know, the book was written first) was for the better.

A caution, though (**spoilers**): my two favourite moments from the movie (Man in black suggests Fezzick "dream of large women" and Westley offering the Dread Pirate Roberts persona to Inigo) aren't here. I guess you can't have all your best ideas at once.

Still, a truly engaging work, and a near perfect piece of storytelling.

Tell me this: How can someone have numerous complaints about a book (the hackneyed resolution about the reason for Owen's voice; tedious melodrama; the simplistic parallels to the Jesus story; moralism up the wazoo; etc., etc., etc.), and yet finish reading all 600+ pages in one weekend?

If I really sat down and thought long and hard about it, I could tell you a million reasons to not love this book. That wouldn't stop you from loving it as much as I did. You can't help but fall in love with little Owen and his friend/narrator/biographer John. The story stucks you in, then sucks you dry, then spits you back out again, changed forever to relfect all the things it wants you to be. Changed to view the world a little differently, and to be a little more soulful.

And of course, how can you not love a book in which the narrator escapes to your hometown. Escapes from the past which he can forget, but which his memory can't.

A professor of mine said that she wasn't going to take the easy route and describe this book as a cross between Raymond Chandler and Albert Camus. Well, too late. The comparison stuck. And it works too. Imagine a detective story where you never find out who the killer is, and it doesn't matter! It's so good.

Auster packs his books with momentous ideas, while leaving the prose dry and sparse. I think it works. Let the reader breathe a bit, and maybe they'll wrap their head around the story tight enough to get hooked in. It is at this point, of course that Auster reveals that there really is no story, and you've just contemplated the true meaning of human existence. Okay, not really. But at least he's got you thinking.

"For humans, the history of cosmology is the history of increasing humiliation." Amis' universe constantly humiliates me, for he is a writer of immense gifts. Unfortunately, sometimes I can't follow him along those barely-trodden paths because the technique stomps all over his humour. That doesn't happen here.

He packs in big ideas and a flurry of big words (my favourite: uxorious) around a story of a writer's jealousy for his best friends success. The eternal debate over the merits of art and commerce are perfectly symbolized in the antagonistic friendship between Richard Tull (whose hyper-complex novels induce migraine headaches in all who dare read its pages) and Gwyn Barry (who shares the same rung in the literary canon with 'Dave' Barry). Don't worry friends, there's no easy answer here. You get to hate both men! And it's funny, too!

Also, check out the cool 'Simpsons' reference.