On M's advice, I've been trying--really trying--to get into Bret Easton Ellis' book The Rules of Attraction. I've tried to read some Ellis before and thought it was awful, but M promised me this one was "accessible". Ha. I suppose it is, if by "accessible" you mean poorly-written, shallow characters whose voices, already weak, are drowned out by an overbearing sense of moralizing on the part of the author. Now, one might say that the characters are supposed to be shallow, that that's the point. After all, the book is a fictional expose of the moral depravity of America's youth in the eighties; it might be expected that the depraved themselves wouldn't be the deepest sorts. But there's a difference between a well-written character with a shallow personality and a character that's so shallowly-written they have no discernible personality at all. The misfits that populate Ellis' book are the latter: nearly identical cut-outs that are little more than mouthpieces for Ellis' "grieving outrage at our spiritual tradition" (LA Times Book Review). This is what makes him "one of the primary inside sources in upper-middle-class America's continuing investigation of what has happened to its children"? (NYT Book Review) Perhaps it does, actually. In truth, the book is more Rush Limbaugh than J.D. Salinger, and more Dr. Laura than anything else. If you're the type of person who thinks Judge Judy is dispensing much-needed justice to a nation led astray, then you'll probably love this book. Otherwise, don't even bother; Ellis is nowhere near as clever a writer as he thinks he is. You won't be missing out on much.