I've read three very different books this week.  The first was Skinny Dip by Carl Hiaasen.  Mr. Hiaasen wrote several hilarious books in the early 90's.  Unfortunately, he's fallen into the Daniel Steele trap; he's just keeps writing the same book.   For cryin' out loud, we get it;  guy who doesn't like nature has no redeeming value as a human being, girl who would take a bullet for a squirrel deserves better, meets guy who loves the swamp as much as she does.  At least the annoying super human Skink only had a cameo in this one and was never mentioned by name.  If he had been, I was going to hurl the book right in the trash.  Skin Tight was laugh out loud funny, Skinny Dip feels like he wrote it in his sleep.

Then I read Elie Wiesel's Night.  At 127 pages, the most horror packed book I've ever read.  I had to keep reminding myself it was true; people are really capable of treating each other like this.  He wrote about seeing the German soldiers flinging babies into flaming pits, that he convinced himself the babies were already dead.  He knew they were alive and later it was shown to be true, but at the time he had to convince himself that they were dead because to believe otherwise was to lose his mind.
  What kind of a person could throw a baby into a fire?  The same type of person who could hold an infant in one hand while using the other to puncture it's skull and suction out it's brain, I guess.  At least the German's couldn't make the babies' mothers complicit in their murders.
  The world has always been filled with horror, just as the story of Cain and Abel taught us.

The third book is A Corner of the Veil, by Laurence Cosse, translated from the French.  Maybe it lost a lot in the translation, because the book jacket describes it as an "ironic, jubilant, thriller" and it was none of those things.  It was dull, predictable and stupid, full of the same shallow "God just wants me to be happy" crap I've read and heard from dozens of self centered, superficial thinkers over the years.  The premise of the book is that a priest finds an essay that proves without a doubt the existence of God. ( Wouldn't you have thought that a bunch of priests would've already believed that the resurrection did just that?) From what the characters say about the essay, the God who is proved is a God of relativity.  How easy is that?  Way to actually think up something, Cosse! That sort of thing always bothers me in books, like when a character is described as being terribly witty and clever, then doesn't do or say a single witty or clever thing in the entire story.  This book also has a very distinct anti-Catholic  bias, so of course I didn't much care for that.  I've read two books about divine revelation that are fifty times better than this forgettable work; The Robe and A Shadow on the Earth.  Heck for that matter, the Harry Potter series says far more about morality, good and evil, right and wrong and the politics of it all, in a much more entertaining, original and fully thought out way than this thin work. 

So, I've read more books this week than I've taken time for since Christmas and the only one worth the time spent was a memoir of the holocaust.  Maybe I'll read Harry Potter again, from the beginning.

 

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