Umapagan Ampikaipakan reviews a book that sounds a must-read in The New Straits Times : Twitterature: The World’s Greatest Books Retold Through Twitter by Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin.There it lies, cunningly clad in those horizontal bands of orange, and white, and orange. Penguin-ed. As if to dupe us to its credence, or credibility, or creed. The sheer audacity of that ampersand between their two names. The heart-wrenching horror of truncating centuries of sublime and (almost) metrical composition into something that is less than one long, deep, audible exhalation. The premise sounds downright appalling. The idea of condensing 60 of literature’s greatest works into little nuggets of twitterese — short statements bound by a 140-character limit — sounds like the perfect 4am activity. It is a pursuit that usually follows the consumption of copious amounts of alcohol and the statement: “You know what would be really fun?” And it is fun. But more than that, it is also clever.
It looks like fun! :
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.
From Oedipus: PARTY IN THEBES!!! Nobody cares I killed that old dude, plus this woman is all over me. Total MILF.
From Paradise Lost: OH MY GOD I'M IN HELL.
2 comments:
Fun! We do this all the time in the pub. It's easy with stuff like Taming of the Shrew which is Kiss Me Kate and 10 Things I hate About You or with basic plots like Du Maurier's The Birds that becomes "Think B Movie with killer birds" but reducing complex stories to a three line summary says as much about the reader as the tale!
This book is really fun! I especially like the Hamlet, Paradise Lost and Oedipus pages :D
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