Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Book Review: Twitterature

Title Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or Less
Author Alexander Aciman
Rating ***1/2
Tags fiction, literature, great books, twitter, tweets, humor 


Great concept! Sixty great works of literature retold in twenty tweets or less - a tweet is a computer message of 140 characters or less. It is a tiny book, but has the full Penguin Classic treatment. You know this book isn't the usual Penguin Classic, though, by the quote at the bottom of the cover: "The classics are so last century" - Guardian.

The works turned into tweets include lots of Shakespeare, some Austen, several of the Russian classics, various Brontes, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Cervantes, and so on.

Examples include: from Hamlet - "WTF is Polonius doing behind the curtain!" From Dante's Inferno: "I'm havin' a midlife crisis. Lost in the woods. Shoulda brought my iPhone".

Lots of amusing stuff. The editors are 19, so there is some level of immaturity, too much cuss words, scatalogical references, and so on. Overall, pretty darn funny. The only one I really don't like and thought was unfair to the original was the Sherlock Holmes one, which is all a series of cocaine jokes.

Thanks to Peter for the great Yule gift!

 


Author – Rensin, Emmett
Publication Penguin (Non-Classics) (2009), Edition: 1, Paperback, 224 pages
Publication date 2009
ISBN 0143117327 / 9780143117322

Posted via web from reannon's posterous

2 comments:

Emma Michaels said...

Great review! Subscribing!

Mary Amanda Axford said...

Thanks! Not posting much at the moment, just got back from a library conference and will be playing catch up for a couple of days.