Snow Falling on Cedars

If it were true that you could judge a book by its cover, this book would carry a photo of a giant vacuum cleaner sucking up a clock, instead of the gentle misty treed picture it does. I would also have approximately 4,366 hours of my time back in order to do more entertaining things, such as figure out a way to get the gopher that is currently mocking our efforts to remove him by turning our yard into a lunar landscape. Maybe I should try stuffing his holes with copies of this book.

I picked this book in a rush at the bookstore. I had the Offspring in an umbrella stroller, which while effective at restraining him at the waist and keeping him from rolling out into traffic, is slightly less effective at keeping his hands from clearing off entire shelves in a matter of seconds. Eager to be on my way as quickly as possible after one shelf went down, I picked SFOC, figuring that even if it wasn't a great work of literature it could be that bad since since it had been made into a movie. It turns out I probably would have had better luck had I let the Offspring pick the book.

The bloated book's writing is flat, the characters completely and utterly humorless (not that Japanese internment camps are funny, but these people are so Serious with a capital S, that you just want to strangle them, or the editor, with a capital S) and the plot, well, let's just say that at one point I thought I'd lost the book and I really wasn't all that sad. The story at the center of the book is a murder – though it's definitely no mystery. I kept hoping I was wrong and that the last few pages would pull off a surprise, but nope—what you think is going to happen on page 20 is exactly what happens at page 420.

The characters are also largely unbelievable. The Japanese are all noble and inscrutable until they're listening to a baby cry in the camp and all the sudden they are thinking of killing it – nobly and inscrutably though I'm sure. There are also two characters who both are described as feeling their rectum burn during bouts of diarrhea. I can't imagine even a doctor gets patients with diarrhea who describe their symptoms with the word rectum.

I could go on and on, but unlike the author of this book, I find brevity beautiful. In fact the best review that I found of this book was this: "The cover is nice, as is the back. Skip the part in between." I could not have said it better, even with 400 more pages.