Book-A-Minute Odyssey

I wish I’d read the Book-A-Minute synopsis of Catcher In The Rye before I ploughed through the whole bloody thing all those years ago, because (I know I’ll probably tramp on lots of toes here) their synopsis is spot on and much less of a waste of time:

Angst angst angst swear curse swear crazy crazy angst swear curse, society sucks, and I’m a stupid jerk.

Other quality works well-showcased here are Animal Farm, Slaughterhouse Five and War And Peace.

In the SF/Fantasy section, I can also vouch for the worth of their synopses of Robert Jordan’s The Eye of the World, The Great Hunt, The Dragon Reborn, and The Shadow Rising. Somewhere in the middle of book five I decided that four overly thick, repetitive books of intensely irritating characters with little or no redeeming qualities had been quite enough, and gave up in disgust – I therefore cannot comment on the accuracy of further synopses of the next, oh, ten million books in the series, but insofar as they ridicule it, they’re probably right.

I disagree with their David Eddings synopses because the Mallorean didn’t mirror the Belgariad. A more accurate approach would be to summarize the Belgariad and the Mallorean, then describe the Elenium and the Tamuli as “See the Belgariad and the Mallorean”. If you’ve never read David Eddings, this will have made absolutely no sense to you, but if you have, you will know exactly what I mean.