Some books are what are known in the trade as "review-proof." So if no one is going to give a **** about the reviewer's judgment, why should anyone bother to read it before reviewing it?

Not that reading Dan Brown's latest would make the critic's task easier.  Best simply to assume that his latest Flash Gordon decoder-ring classic will be up to his usual standards. Summarizing the plot probably won't help the reader much, so let's just say it, like all of Brown's works, involves a message left at an old mill discovered by a plucky girl with a red roadster.

Again like his previous tree-killers, this one features plots and characters that range from the implausible to the ridiculous, although he does get one thing right. His protagonist, Robert Langdon, is supposedly a Harvard professor in a field that no one has ever heard of who spends all of his time gallivanting around the world instead of doing what he's paid to do, which is teach students. Combined with the bad haircut, you've got the very picture of a contemporary Harvard professor. 

Jeffrey "the Ladies' Man" Masson, despoiler of impressionable Radcliffe girls and the Freud Archives, returns to the ranks of the unreadable with a steaming plateful of hypocrisy.  Having been exiled to the Antipodes for his revolting treatment of his fellow human beings, he now seeks to mint royalties by whining about how we mistreat animals by doing what comes naturally to them and us: eating them.

As a side dish, we'll bet that the old scold will tell us how wonderfully healthy it is to eat tofu and beans all day every day. We might also mention, not that Jeffrey needs any help, that eating crap in vegan restaurants is a great way to score with chicks, although it does seem like a high price to pay.

It sure is quite a scramble up the moral ladder from the erstwhile graduate student who boasted that he had rogered 1,000 women (thus equaling the entire output of the remainder of his fellow Harvard graduate students). These days, New Zealand Jeffrey wouldn't think of treating meat the way he treated women. 

Another long-time friend of the Review of Unreadable Books is back, with a upchucking [Surely, uplifting? – Ed.] tale of how an untalented sportswriter stuck in the wilderness of Detroit, Michigan can afford an oceanfront condo in Naples, Florida by recycling the same crap that he's been living off of for years.

Most of us have to deal with annoying old people (and some of us are well on our way to qualifying as such), but only a few gifted visionaries can keep spinning their bubbameises into cold, hard cash. This time, Mitch has himself a rabbi whose pearls of wisdom our thrifty recycler is only too happy to package and sell.

This round of treacle comes wrapped in a carefully sanitized version of "faith" that should get our author some shelf space even in the holy-roller bookstores, at least until Sarah Palin's memoirs knock it off the end caps. Who knew that you could live large off of other people's platitudes? As Mitch himself might say, ya gotta believe.