 What is the general tone of this writing genre?
Except for one thing: One of the books, The Art of Happiness , which collects and simplifies the Dalai Lama's philosophy, got the Shopping Avenger to thinking. Perhaps it is wrong, the Shopping Avenger thought, to complain about the petty insults and inconveniences of life in the materialistic '90s. The Shopping Avenger does not make light of the Dalai Lama or of the notion that there is more to life than the impatient acquisition of material goods. If the Shopping Avenger were not, for a superhero, extremely nonjudgmental--as opposed to his alter ego, who is considered insufferably judgmental by his alter ego's wife--the Shopping Avenger would tell the occasional correspondent to let go of his petty grievance and get a life.
 Ironic.
 Sorrowful.  Academic.  Ironic.  Infuriated.