A Busy Man's Guide to Easy Reading by Dave Barry One effective technique for avoiding boring conversations on airplanes is to pull an extremely sharp ax out of your briefcase and spend the entire flight fondling it. Of course, to get the ax onto the airplane, you'll have to convince the airport security people that you're not a hijacker: SECURITY PERSON: Excuse me, sir, but there's an extremely sharp ax in your briefcase. YOU: I need it for my business. I'm an ax murderer. SECURITY PERSON: Oh, okay. Sorry to inconvenience you, but we have to be on the lookout for hijackers. It's for your own protection. The only problem with the ax approach is that it tends to make the flight attendants skittish, and you may be forced to waste valuable time dealing with large numbers of armed law-enforcement personnel after you land. So the technique I use to ward off boring conversations is to carry a book, which I pull out the instant a boring person tries to talk to me. The problem here is that you actually have to read the book, which may turn out to be even more boring than the person you're sitting next to because as a rule books contain far too many words. For example, I was recently on a flight to St. Louis, and I read a new book about James Bond, the famous spy. I thought there would be no new James Bond books because the person who wrote them is dead, but evidently the folks in the publishing world decided that if the original author was inconsiderate enough to die, then, by God, they would find somebody else to write his books for him. I think they ought to use the same approach with other famous dead authors, such as William Shakespeare: "The Warble, Peddle, and Leek Publishing Company proudly announces 'Romeo and Juliet II' -- a sweeping saga of lust and passion that begins where the best-selling original left off! The story begins with the discovery that the two lovers didn't really stab themselves hard enough to die, and follows them through their lustful and passionate efforts to escape the clutches of their warring families and find a peaceful life! Now on sale at every supermarket in the world." 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. Think of all the valuable hours we would save if authors got right to the point this way. We'd all have more time for really important activities, such as reading magazine columns.