"I was surprised at how badly-written this book is. First of all, the very first line has an obscure reference to Holden Caulfield."

"Does he not realize that Catcher int he Rye is not the touchstone it once was?... I suspect that age has hindered his ability to write coherently, The book could have used a very strong editor, or an editor at all. Some sentences are so labored and confusing that they have to be read a number of times to be understood. Perhaps his vanity prevented him from seeking an editor who could have corralled it into a better book...."

From a 2-star review of Woody Allen's autobiography "Apropos of Nothing." Something made me want to read bad reviews at Amazon instead of this WaPo piece I'd clicked on: "If you’ve run out of toilet paper, Woody Allen’s memoir is also made of paper."

I'm reading the book. The first few sentences are especially good:

Like Holden, I don’t feel like going into all that David Copperfield kind of crap, although in my case, a little about my parents you may find more interesting than reading about me. Like my father, born in Brooklyn when it was all farms, ball boy for the early Brooklyn Dodgers, a pool hustler, a bookmaker, a small man but a tough Jew in fancy shirts with slicked-back patent leather hair a la George Raft. No high school, the Navy at sixteen, on a firing squad in France when they killed an American sailor for raping a local girl. A medal-winning marksman, always loved pulling a trigger and carried a pistol till the day he died with a full head of silver hair and twenty-twenty eyesight at a hundred. One night during World War I his boat got hit by a shell somewhere off the coast in the icy waters of Europe. It sank. Everyone drowned except for three guys who made the miles-long swim to shore. He was one of the three that could handle the Atlantic. But that’s how close I came to never being born.

The famous — not obscure! — first sentence of "Catcher in the Rye" is:

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

If that's obscure, then reading is obsolete, and what does it matter that a writer refers to it?

Here's the beginning of "David Copperfield" that writers who want to begin in the middle of the story establish their voice by calling "crap":

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously....

ADDED: Originally, I spelled "Apropos" the way I learned to write it in French, "A Propos." (Note that I followed the rule that you don't use accent marks on capital letters.) Anyway, as Sebastian points out in the comments, the book title as printed is "Apropos of Nothing." So that's that, and it doesn't matter what I think is the standard way to use the French phrase in English. But out of curiosity, I looked it up in the OED, and the spelling of the English word is "apropos." That's how John Dryden wrote it in 1668.

But the French form — "à propos" — also appears in many English works. Alexander Pope wrote it that way in 1738. Take your pick: How French-y do you want to be? Is it "French-y" or "Frenchy" or is there no excuse for not just saying "French"? I say writer's choice, and it's my blog. And it's Woody Allen's book, and he wrote "Apropos." And he's enamored of the French. From his telling of his teen years:

One girl asked me to take her to the film O. Henry’s Full House. The only O. Henry I knew was a candy bar. Another brought up Swann’s Way, but I was too busy demonstrating how funny it was when Milton Berle walked on the sides of his feet. These girls read and spoke French, and one had been to Europe and had seen Michaelangelo’s David.

Hey, "Frenchy" — sans hyphen — is in the OED. It means: "Characteristic of what is French (as opposed to English, etc.); French in nature, French-like. Also: sexually adventurous or suggestive." Ooh! I like this example from 1814: "Their dinner smelt very frenchy and savoury, and consisted of stewed spinach and eggs...." That's very food-y. What about sex-y? From 1967: " Word had gotten about that the plays in her repertoire were ‘Frenchy’, meaning naughty."