More of a coffee table book to be picked up randomly and perused than a tome to be read straight through from beginning to end.
Woody Allen is one of my favorite film directors, and I think he is a brilliant writer, however, that doesn't mean every single thing he writes is humorous or profound as the editor of this book seems to believe. Allen is writing stories, not composing proverbs to be nuggets of wisdom. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of great stuff here, but the editor has thrown in a lot of excerpts from Allen's prose, monologues, plays and sreenplays that seem as though they are included just to fill up space.
This is especially evident in the pieces taken from Allen's scripts. Not all, but enough to be annoying, come across as random and offer nothing to the reader. This is nothing against Allen or his writing; every bit of dialogue in a script, or sentence in prose for that matter, is not intended to impart something great. Words are used to reveal plot, character, etc. Taken out of that original context, as they are in this book, they just kind of dangle there out of place.
Still, it's an interesting book overall, and includes some great photographs, I just would have liked to see more selective choices by the editor.
