Me of Little Faith Book

I'm a huge fan of Lewis Black: I think he's very funny but also very smart, even (especially) when taking on some of stickiest issues. That is why I was so disappointed with this book.

I think it may simply be that Black's humor doesn't translate well into the written form. It felt like he was stuck in between two goals: an honest but amusing discussion of religion and an effort to translate his loud-yelling style of humor onto paper. But his voice never came through, and the book ended up with below-average but inoffensive writing peppered with vulgarities and sentences in all-caps that marked Black's effort to yell on paper. But Black doesn't come through in his writing, and the whole effort comes off as forced and futile.

The discussion itself quickly lost my interest because of how disjointed it was. Black has no real unifying point or theme to convey, except that each chapter somehow touches (some very tangentially) on the subject of religion or spirituality. But the fact that one chapter follows another does not mean that there's any continuity between the two of them, and Black is content to play hopscotch all over the board while hoping his reader can make large thematic jumps along with him. This becomes more a series of very short vignettes than a unified book.

So, as a whole, I was very disappointed. The book quickly turned into a bathroom reader for me (the short chapters and disjointedness are conducive to that purpose), and even then I only managed a chuckle or two along the way.