We'll be posting site updates as they occur, but more interestingly we'll also be putting up, on a daily basis, our favorite user-contributed Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis from our new book detail pages. If you’re not familiar with the Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis, it’s a way for the community to create an extremely concise summary of a book. Here’s a few of the best we’ve seen submitted so far:
- Santa Claus gives deadly weapons to children so they can assassinate a witch. (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, by C.S. Lewis)
- Sort of like the Hope/Crosby road movies, only with baby-eating cannibals. (The Road, by Cormac McCarthy)
- Vampire falls in love with his dinner. (Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer)
- Anthropomorphic feline wages psychological warfare against a sentient goldfish, all related in anapestic tetrameter. (The Cat in the Hat, by Dr. Seuss).
Feel free to submit a synopsis for your favorite book and see if it makes it into the top twitter list! (And, just so you know, we tend to look favorably upon synopses that amuse us, so get creative!)
As long as you've signed up for twitter, you might also want to follow a few of your favorite authors. Here's a short list of some of the more popular writers on twitter (many who twitter several times a day about what they're thinking or what they're working on):
John Cleese, Paulo Coelho, Stephen Fry, Warren Ellis, Chris Anderson, Neil Gaiman, Meg Cabot, Derren Brown, Joe Hill, Andy Ihnatko, Elizabeth Bear, Chuck Palahniuk
Longer lists can be found here and here.Sign up and send us a 'hello' when you get there. And please 're-tweet' any of the Synopses that you particularly enjoy. We'll see you on Twitter!
