Actually, forget that. I haven’t read it in a long time. Missing fingers are an important part of the plot.
“A bigga crocka shit I nevah heard.”
According to the book The Experts Speak, an editor rejected Marcel Proust’s Rememberance of Things Past with the comment, “I can’t see why a chap should need thirty pages to describe how he turns over in bed before going to sleep.”
Patrick O’Brien’s Aubrey-Maturin series. It’s about twenty books long, and about a British navy captain during the Napoleonic wars, and his friend, who’s a doctor, and… Look, just read the first one!
That is the same conversation I had with my mother, decades ago! Eventually I agreed to watch it with her.
I don’t know anyone else who’s ever heard of Good Omens. It’s not my favorite book, but it’s one of the most charming. I particularly liked the dog.
I remember trying to convince my friends to watch the X-Files the first season. I finally resorted to, “You just have to watch it; people will be talking about it.”
You don’t? Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman are both hugely popular authors. I reckon that at least half of the Straight Dope regulars will have heard of the book, and at least one in five will have read it.
I’ve read it all right, reading some Pratchett right now, but I honestly never heard of the guy until someone on the Straight Dope recommended his work. I think a particular subculture of geek is attracted to Pratchett, but I don’t know many people in the mainstream who have heard of him.
He’s the most popular living author in Britain. (At least, he was a few years ago, this may have changed since.) 55 Million books sold worldwide. Hardly restricted to geeks.
I discovered Good Omens through being a fan of Gaiman rather than Pratchett, which has just reminded me that Sandman is also completely impossible to describe.
“There are these seven siblings, called the Endless. They’re sort of like gods except that they’re actually more powerful. And it’s about how they interact with humans.”
That’s a start, but…does it capture what someone is actually going to get out of reading them? Not really.
Hm. I’d describe Sandman this way (though it’s been a long time since I read it) –
You have seven Endless, immortal beings that each personify a facet of sentient existence: Desire and Despair and so on, but also Death and Destiny. A human occultist tries to capture Death but gets Dream instead. This throws things cosmically out of balance, and the story’s partly about that, partly about the effects the Endless have on humanity, partly about the effects humanity have on the Endless. The best part: it’s a long, drifting, musing series of stories rather than a narrative, yet it all comes together quite neatly in the end – and it’s apparent that it was designed to do just that from the very start.
Long story short: it’s a story of the hubris of the gods.
I find this unlikely, unless J.K. Rowling has emigrated.
But yes, I have read Good Omens, although in general I find Pratchett…uh, pretty boring. (I slogged my way through several Discworld novels because I really wanted to like them and I was sure that if I kept going, they would click! So many of my friends enjoy them! But they never worked for me.) I do love Neil Gaiman, though.
Just try and make the plot of The Lord of the Rings sound sensible to someone unfamiliar with it!
“Have you read Harry Potter? You have? Great. Well, there’s this villain, Sauron, who created a horcrux a long time ago- the horcrux for him was a magical ring that would allow him to rule the world. He was killed but, like Voldy, he still exists because of his horcrux. Now that he’s preparing his second coming the good guys are trying to destroy it.”
The problems in summarisation described so far mostly seem to reside in the fact that what seems to be an unavoidable and unpromising initial premise of the story is distracting to the casual listener from the real merits of the production. The Doctor, Buffy, and so on.
But I figure that one example that is very difficult to summarise in a sentence or two for a quite different reason is Pulp Fiction - the fragmentation of temporal sequence that is nevertheless necessary for the unfolding of the story.
I do not know any-one who has read either; most of the people I know prefer a more reality-based fiction.
On the other hand, it seems a lot have read William Gibson. (I would have nominated Neuromancer, but I can’t come up with a description.)
Perhaps he just doesn’t have much U.S. exposure? I’m willing to bet the average American has never heard of him. I’m just gauging this on trying to convince other people to read Pratchett. As a general rule they’ve never heard of him and aren’t interested.
Which is not to minimize his brilliance. I love his stuff. I’m reading Reaper Man right now, and it’s exquisite. They have no idea what they’re missing.
Gaiman, on the other hand is a harder sell. I’ve heard his comics are wonderful, but his novels, with the exception of Good Omens, bore the crap out of me.
When I was growing up, I was a big fan of teen horror author Christopher Pike. He wrote some adult novels too, one called ‘‘The Listeners’’ which I picked up in high school, and it was awesome. It was about this cop who uncovers an ancient race of lizard people that can only come into the world by channeling the power of identical twins. Well, technically the lizard people are human people. Anyway, it’s the most realistic depiction of channeling ancient lizard ancestors I’ve ever seen. Definitely worth checking out.
I think a lot of times people try to explain too much, resulting in even more confusion. Less confusing descriptions that don’t lose people:
Dexter: He’s a psychopath that only kills murderers. He’s not meant to be totally sympathetic, but is a great character.
Doctor Who: It’s a scifi show about an alien time traveller that sets up base in London. It’s scifi, so there are the occassion aliens, spaceships and robots, though many of the episodes take place during recent history.
Lord of the Rings: It’s a fantasy novel about a band of likely and unlikely heroes off on a quest to save the world.
I think the OP’s example of Watership Down is perfect. It is a great novel, and when people hear “it’s about rabbits” they totally lose all interest.
I remember reading one of those, or perhaps some other Christopher Pike book with channeled alien lizards (I don’t remember anything about twins). I was annoyed that, once again, reptiles were being cast as the bad guys.
Rowling clearly usurped Pratchett, but before she came along, he was #1 in the UK and is certainly still in the top ten there.
I once saw a panel where Moshe Feder, an editor for the Science Fiction Book Club, commented on how it was hard to write summaries of SF compared to mainstream novel:
Mainstream novel: “It’s set in 1920s Paris.”
SF novel: “It’s set on a planet that his different gravities depending on whether you’re on the equator or the poles and which is populated by a civilization of intelligent crustacean-like creatures.”
Avenue Q. Especially the puppets.