We're all a bunch of fucking dilettantes, so let's just openly admit to not actually reading much of anything. We do, however, read the book reviews, and in order to ensure you are as unjustifiably verbose on such matters as we are, we present the return of our weekly Reading About Reading series. Back from a brief hiatus (cough, cough, Bellevue), Intern Alexis sifts through the crap of the New York Times Book Review to present you with pearls of wisdom sure to propell you through the boring, bookish chit-chat.

Chronicles, Volume One
By Bob Dylan
Reviewed by Tom Carson

The review's opening sentence — "Bob Dylan's 'Chronicles: Volume One covers a lot of shrewdly selected ground, but never addresses one burning question: So what was up with the mustache, dude?" — left us scratching our heads wondering, "did Howie Mandell write this review?" Apparently the answer is "no," and the author of this ridiculously-written review is a certain Tom Carson. Luckily, Mr. Carson takes that mustache ball and runs with it: "For him to turn memoirist is a mustache of another sort..." Ah, so THAT's why you chose such a retarded first sentence...so you could set us up for and wow us with that gem of a line. Carson spends the rest of the long review awkwardly comparing Dylan to Huck Finn, going so far as to use the word "Huckstering" and referring to "Huck's bar mitzvah." In the end, this m-dash- and parentheses-heavy review is nothing short of confusing.

Kaufman & Co. Broadway Comedies
By George S. Kaufman with Edna Ferber, Moss Hart, Ring Lardner and
Morrie Ryskind
Reviw by Woody Allen

Literary masturbation at its finest, Sir Woody Allen muses on (and on
and on) about the life and works of his idol, the late, great playwright George S. Kaufman. A huge Woody Allen fan, we were a bit disappointed with how un-funny the review was. There was an amusing story about how Allen used to stroll past Kaufman's 62nd Street townhouse in search of inspiration, imagining Kaufman seated in the living room next to Max Gordon and Ethel Merman listening to George Gershwin play the piano. However, Allen learned later from his wife (which one?!?!) that the Kaufmans actually lived on 63rd street and that, all along, he had been standing outside of the wrong house. Badum BUM! Funny anecdote aside, the review was a bit on the flat side, and like all forms of masturbation, both literary and literal, this one left us wanting more.

Hip: The History
By John Leland
Reviewed by David Kamp

We thought it was a little ironic that David Kamp accuses John Leland of "following some professional etiquette for 'proper' history writing," when Mr. Kamp himself seems to very closely follow "some professional etiquette" of his own — for "proper" book review writing, that is. We've read a bunch of reviews of this book, and Mr. Kamp's was a real snoozer. Come on, New York Times, it's a book about HIPNESS! Can't you at least provide us with some unverified trends about the meatpacking district being over or tell us that the Upper East Side is the new Bushwick or something? Also, the very small, very blurry, very awkwardly-placed photograph of Andy Warhol is very odd. Also, isn't it funny that someone named "Kamp" wrote a review of a book called "Hip"??? We crack ourselves up, we do.

Letters To The Editor
The letters page proved to be quite a treat this week as readers got real with the editors of the Book Review. Jim Holt, in response to Zoe Heller's review of Toni Bentley's anal sex-o-drama-rama, suggests that instead of referring to Bridget Jones who "cheerfully engaged" in backdoor pleasure, Heller "might have found a more impressive literary pedigree for anal sex" and suggest Lady Chatterly from "Lady Chatterly's Lover" who was sodomized by Oliver Mellors. David Witinsky accuses Joe Queenan of writing a "smug, elitist tirade" on A.J. Jacobs' most recent book and that Queenan offers "only vicious and arrogant below-the-belt punches at Jacobs." Alice Rutkowski complains that in the newly designed Book Review, the "oversize photos of authors" are "outrageous and sometimes inflammatory." For example, she asks, "The woman who wrote the memoir about anal sex gets a huge, almost half-page glamour shot? Who are you people?" Indeed!