Quick Reads, v. 2013
The first and second “Quick Reads” threads were a lot of fun, but we’ve all done a lot of reading and listening since then. Let’s do a little catching up.
Date: November 29, 2013
Categories: Nonrandom Craziness
Thursday, 28 March 2024
Life, the universe, pies, hot-pink bunnies, world domination, and everything
The first and second “Quick Reads” threads were a lot of fun, but we’ve all done a lot of reading and listening since then. Let’s do a little catching up.
Date: November 29, 2013
Categories: Nonrandom Craziness
Xenophon’s Anabasis:
And thence he marches forth X stades, Y parasangs into Z, an inhabited town, large and prosperous….
I love these threads. Let’s see, what to condense… How about the Divine Comedy?
1. Inferno
I had not thought death had undone so many. Yeow, Satan!
2. Purgatorio
All this walking had better be worth it. Wow, Beatrice!
3. Paradiso
Colors! Music! Geometry! OMG, the Primum Mobile!
A brief history of time
So here’s all the stuff you already know about time. Then it gets complicated.
Indiana Jones and the Seven Veils– Before any of the movies, Indy married some lady who wasn’t Marion, found proof the Celts were in South America before Columbus, and rescued Percy Fawcett… Wait, wouldn’t this have been mentioned in the movies… Oops, better kill off Fawcett and Indy’s wife in a plane crash in the Amazon and give him amnesia so he doesn’t remember any of this!
Every Joss Whedon show
Main character: I’m going to help save the world AND survive! (They do, but your favorite character doesn’t.)
Divergent trilogy:
Knowledge is power, and you know what they say about that.
Guns also help.
“Fallen Giants: A History of Himalayan Mountaineering from the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes”:
Chapter 1: Ever wanted to know the geography and demographics of the Himalayas in depth? Of course you do!
Chapter 2: We’re all imperialists and colonialists and have no idea what will happen to our bodies at eighteen thousand feet.
Chapter 3: “Into the Silence” condensed to forty pages, for people who would rather read this book’s 400 pages instead of that book’s 500 pages.
Chapter 4: We start to get the hang of climbing in the Himalayas and actually have some success.
Chapter 5: We start to get the hang of climbing in the Himalayas and actually have some success and some of us are Nazis.
Chapter 6: We could have done a lot of great climbing in the 1940s if it wasn’t for that stupid World War II.
Chapter 7: “The Conquest of Everest” condensed to thirty pages because the original version is out of print, anyway.
Chapter 8: We climb basically everything and are bosses.
Chapter 9: We climb every mountain from the previous chapter by new routes and some of us are hippies. Also, some of us are sexists.
Chapter 10: Now we do it again by other new routes and sometimes without oxygen but all of the expeditions have lots of drama and everybody talks smack about everybody else in their books.
Should I do “The Third Man Factor” and “The Billionaire and The Mechanic” as normal funny summaries or as fake author pitches to an editor?
The Third Man Factor: Save space in your bookbag at the library! Instead of taking out the printed equivalent of Creepypasta, your favorite collection of survival stories, AND that popular science magazine that caught your eye with the intriguing cover story on neuroscience, just rent a book that awkwardly tries to mix all three together! You’ll learn just enough about a fascinating psychological phenomenon to be left waiting for a better book about it!
The Billionaire and the Mechanic, the Pitch:
Editor: “So, Ms. Guthrie, I’ve read the first few chapters you sent in and I have to say that your book shows promise, but there are also some things that could be improved.”
Julian Guthrie (JG): “Thank you.”
Editor: “I like that you’ve taken some classic sports story conventions and applied them to sailing, as that’s not really a sport that’s too familiar from movies or television. Baseball, basketball, hockey, soccer, track and field, auto racing, those have all been done, but the choice of sailing is very innovative in that regard.”
JG: “Well, it really seemed like a fascinating sport, intriguing from a technical perspective and also very beautiful.”
Editor: “But aside from that, I think you’ve laid on the cliches a bit too thickly.” *ruffles through papers* “For example, one of your two main characters, the ones mentioned in the title, Norbert Baj- bayg–”
JG: “Bajurin. It’s pronounced like Byron.”
Editor: “So why didn’t you spell it like that?”
JG: “Well, his family is supposed to be from the former Yugoslavia, and–”
Editor: “Ah, well, that’s innovative enough. Norbert Bajurin. Now, I get that he’s meant to be the hero and I like him well enough– a San Francisco radiator salesman and auto mechanic with a strained relationship to his immigrant father about who’s going to take over the business, a bit homely-looking but good-hearted. Pretty conventional but nothing wrong with it. But I feel that it strains a bit of credibility to then see him referred to as the commodore of a yacht club.”
JG: “Well, those are the standard terms. But as I make clear in the book, the Golden Gate Yacht Club’s members are generally working- and middle-class people like Bajurin who aren’t rich or snobby, even if the terms have that association.”
Editor: “Are you sure you can’t just call it, like, a Sailing Club and maybe have him have some other title?”
JG: “Yacht Club and Commodore are the standard terms, anyone who really knows about sailing won’t accept the book if we don’t use them.”
Editor: “Fine, just make sure you emphasize that they aren’t snobs and characterize the Golden Gate Club to make it seem like a real place, or else it will simply fall into the cliche that I already can see you’re following with it.”
JG: “The cliche?”
Editor: “That the club is cash-strapped, has trouble paying bills, and is losing members to the fancier nearby club that you say IS full of snobs, the St. Francis Yacht Club. Now, I can predict that the driving action of the story is going to be that Bajurin must drive the members to try something Bold and Daring in order to win back prestige and financial support–”
JG: *looks at feet* “Well, yes, that is the plotline, but I’m planning a twist later on–”
Editor: *turns to another page* “But as for the chapters I have here so far, there’s the matter of your other major character, Larry Ellison. You named him LARRY?”
JG: “That’s his name. I mean, it’s short for Lawrence, but–”
Editor: “I admit that name is cliched for a rich character but seems very fitting with the sort of archetype you seem to be setting him up as.”
JG: “He wasn’t born rich, he started a computer company and–”
Editor: “You’re kind of going for the whole Steve Jobs thing, we get it, having him be friends with the real Steve Jobs was a cute touch. But the ‘Oh, you’ve never heard of him or his company because they mostly make products for the government and other big corporations and not things you can buy in a store’ seemed like a cop out on having to imagine new technology and actually have it in the story.”
JG: “It wasn’t a cop-out, that’s how I imagined Oracle as operating.”
Editor: “Yeah, that name, can you change that? I mean, we get it, it’s Greek mythology and therefore ancient and sophisticated and vaguely ominous. Also, since you seem to be introducing so many Australian characters, it will sound like ‘Aw-uh-cull’ if they say it out loud.”
JG: “I hadn’t thought of that, honestly.”
Editor: “Well, maybe you could give him a bit more characterization, all I know so far is that he’s very self-assured and kind of shallow and likes expensive things. Now, from the name ‘Larry’ and the pretending-to-be-Japanese I get that he’s going to be a somewhat comic villain, but–”
JG: “Villain?”
Editor: “Well, of course Ellison is going to be the antagonist, right? You gave him a goatee for Pete’s sake! At the point your manuscript left off, he was arguing with the St. Francis Yacht Club about creating a team to compete for the America’s Cup, so clearly he’s going to force them into letting him do it and name it what he wants. But Bajurin will rally the Golden Gate to raise money to create their own team and go to New Zealand and defeat Ellison and then the New Zealanders.” *looks over the top of his glasses* “Is that not the exact path you planned out for your story to take?”
JG: *is flustered and confused* “No, no, not at all.” *composes self, takes deep breath* “What I was thinking is that Bajurin hears that Ellison is planning on creating a team but having disagreements with the St. Francis Yacht Club, so he contacts him offering to be the team’s home club.”
Editor: *suddenly fascinated* “Collaboration, huh?”
JG: “Ellison accepts and starts his team under their flag with help from BMW. They hire a bunch of professionals from around the world who fight among themselves but gradually become a team.”
Editor: “As you do.”
JG: “They go to Auckland and compete with the other possible challengers. They defeat them, one by one.”
Editor: “And they become the challenger?”
JG: “No! That’s the twist! They go the distance and make it to the finals, but at the very last moment they get defeated by the Swiss team.”
Editor: “The… Swiss… team?”
JG: “Yeah, because at this level the backers can afford to travel far to train, and hire professionals from other countries, it doesn’t matter if their home country is landlocked. So they’re actually really good and they go on to defeat the New Zealand team and win the America’s Cup. So our team goes home to lick their wounds and train.”
Editor: “Is there a montage?”
JG: “Sort of. And the Golden Gate starts doing well again, but Bajurin and his father still don’t get along. So they go to Spain four years later to compete again–”
Editor: “Why Spain?”
JG: “Well, Switzerland’s not on the ocean, like you said. And their boss is this guy Ernesto Bertarelli and he’s the heir to a pharmaceutical company and super-obsessed with winning–”
Editor: “Ah! And HE’S the antagonist?”
JG: “In a way, but the struggle just to improve and best themselves is the main conflict.”
Editor: “Why don’t you transfer some of the blatant villain symbolism from Ellison to him?”
JG: “I’ll look into that. So they compete with the other challengers, and, here’s the other twist– they lose again! This time, they don’t even make the finals!”
Editor: “What?”
JG: “So they go back and train some more while the Swiss prepare for the next event, but it turns out that they’ve been breaking the official rules and even though the current champion can make certain rules for the next competition, they’re overstepping and there’s all of this complicated legal stuff… so Ellison sues them!”
Editor: “Uh, okay…”
JG: “And the case goes on for years and there are four trials!”
Editor: “A bit of courtroom drama… I don’t know if it will work, but keep going.”
JG: “So finally, the teams and the court work out a deal that the Golden Gate team and the Swiss team will have a special one-on-one rematch in Spain and they don’t have to follow the normal rules for building their boats. So they both build these HUGE catamarans and the US team hires the Australian guy who was mentioned in the first chapter as captain of one of the other boats in the Sydney-Hobart Race–”
Editor: “Chekhov’s Gunman Jimmy Whatshisname, I see. Go on.”
JG: “And THIS time, they win!”
Editor: “And it’s a happy ending?”
JG: “Well, Bajurin still argues with his father, but he saved the yacht club, and Ellison is slightly less shallow and plans to open a school.”
Editor: “Going for bittersweet, I guess. All that and they still don’t overcome their basic issues.”
JG: *looks at shoes again* *suddenly perks up* “Well, there’s a sequel! Or maybe we could just add it as an epilogue of a few hundred more pages to this book, I guess.”
Editor: “Mmmm, go on.”
JG: “So, three years later, the Golden Gate team are the new defenders, and that means they can make the rules, and they change to these crazy catamarans with hydrofoils and all of the teams come to San Francisco to prepare. But while they’re training, our team has an accident and has to rebuild their boat almost from scratch! And then the Swedish team has another accident and one of their sailors dies!”
Editor: “You said Swedish there. Did you mean to say–”
JG: “Yes, the Swiss aren’t in this one, they drop out after they lost last time. This is a new team from Sweden. The other challengers are the Italians and the New Zealanders.”
Editor: “Who want a rematch?”
JG: “Yup, exactly! Both of the teams fix their boats and the final match comes down to the Golden Gate team vs. the New Zealanders, and they get their butts kicked!”
Editor: “What? Your ending is that they lose?”
JG: “No, they don’t lose, they ALMOST lose. They end up with one point when the other team has eight and the first to nine points wins, but they make crew changes and fix their boat–”
Editor: “And have a montage?”
JG: “Yes! And they go back out and win the next race! And they keep winning, they end up beating the New Zealand team nine to eight and they get to keep the America’s Cup!”
Editor: *thinks silently for a few moments* “Well, it’s not as cliched as I thought it was going to be from the first few chapters. I might change a few things, but on the whole, it sounds like you’ve got the makings of a great sports story here. If you can pull this off, we might even hear from Hollywood about the rights.”
JG: “Oh, and then four years later they have to defend it again in Bermuda and–”
Editor: “Woah, woah, save that for the sequel.”