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/ Well, anyway, I was reading this James  \
| Bond book, and right away I realized    |
| that like most books, it had too many   |
| words. The plot was the same one that   |
| all James Bond books have: An evil      |
| person tries to blow up the world, but  |
| James Bond kills him and his henchmen   |
| and makes love to several attractive    |
| women. There, that's it: 24 words. But  |
| the guy who wrote the book took         |
| *thousands* of words to say it.         |
|                                         |
| Or consider "The Brothers Karamazov",   |
| by the famous Russian alcoholic Fyodor  |
| Dostoyevsky. It's about these two       |
| brothers who kill their father. Or      |
| maybe only one of them kills the        |
| father. It's impossible to tell because |
| what they mostly do is talk for nearly  |
| a thousand pages. If all Russians talk  |
| as much as the Karamazovs did, I don't  |
| see how they found time to become a     |
| major world power.                      |
|                                         |
| I'm told that Dostoyevsky wrote "The    |
| Brothers Karamazov" to raise the        |
| question of whether there is a God. So  |
| why didn't he just come right out and   |
| say: "Is there a God? It sure beats the |
| heck out of me."                        |
|                                         |
| Other famous works could easily have    |
| been summarized in a few words:         |
|                                         |
| * "Moby Dick" -- Don't mess around with |
| large whales because they symbolize     |
|                                         |
| nature and will kill you. * "A Tale of  |
| Two Cities" -- French people are crazy. |
|                                         |
\ -- Dave Barry                           /
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