The other day I sat at a computer in the Pause taking personality tests for two hours. My friends and I discovered these tests at emode.com and ever since have developed the need to find out our emotional IQ or which celebrity we match up with.

One of the tests claimed it could tell me the color of my aura. In thinking about this week's book, I realized that it too has an aura. Some people may think this is like saying that animals can talk (they can!), but it definitely is true. My favorites tend to be sparkly, clear and bright; the book I read last was exactly the opposite.

I'm a fan of short stories because they make express-reading a lot easier. Mark Kurlansky's collection, The White Man in the Tree, did not, however, go by very quickly.

Now that I'm done with it and want to talk about it, I'm having a hard time coming up with something to say. It wasn't exactly bad, just a little foggy at best (hence the murky aura). Plus, the characters seemed distant.

Set in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, New York, or Paris, the plots aimed to describe difficulties and differences among the races, sexes, and economic classes.

The longest of the bunch (sharing the book's title), plodded through the odd relationship between a middle-aged white man and his younger Haitian girlfriend-turned-meteorologist. As with most of the other stories, there were several rather unimportant characters that created a mild case of mental chaos.

Other stories involved factory-working men dressed as women, an island with a budding kosher chicken business, and an upper-crust woman deciding not to hurl herself into an inactive volcano. It is much easier to fall in with the characters if they are in the midst of a problem for which the reader can take sides, but the struggles Kurlansky writes about did not create that tendency.

They were too simple, too base, and at the same time too out of reach. If each story had been developed into a short novel, the clouds may have cleared. Alas, Kurlansky chose not to take the time, and I was left with a book I will soon forget.