AND WHEN DID YOU LAST SEE YOUR FATHER (Blake Morrison) - June 29/08

Depressing yet entertaining, this is a pretentious book by a poet who nevertheless does manage to touch upon a lot of truths. Though there are long stretches in which the whole thing feels like a diary - ie who cares? - Morrison does a nice job of painting vivid portraits of his father and the various folks in his life. **1/2 out of ****

LOLITA (Vladimir Nabokov) - July 26/08

Well, it took me over six months to finally finish this virtually unreadable monstrosity. Nabokov is so in love with his own voice and his ability to craft absurdly flowery sentences, that he infuses the majority of the novel with a nigh interminable vibe. And while there are a few interesting passages here and there, Lolita is primarily the kind of book one struggles to read (I glazed over most of the paragraphs). Awful. Just awful. .* out of ****

WHAT JUST HAPPENED? (Art Linson) - June 10/08

A very breezy autobiography by producer Art Linson detailing his experiences getting movies like The Edge (AKA Bookworm), Great Expectations, and Fight Club made. This is an incredibly breezy read (I finished it in about two days) that's chock full of interesting anecdotes and stories (ie Alec Baldwin's beard), and it's also an eye-opening look at just what a producer does. The wraparound stuff with "Jerry" is kind of superfluous and some of this stuff is just too inside, but on the whole, What Just Happened? is as entertaining as one might've hoped. ***1/2 out of ****