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gobbleobble 's review for:
Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books Retold Through Twitter
by Alexander Aciman, Emmett Rensin
**BOOK CLUB BONUS ROUND**
Laura and I headed back to my hometown of Rocky Mount this past weekend to attend my little brother’s Homecoming. It’s a two hour drive each way, and thanks to a little Southern Snowstorm, we ended up with six total hours to blow. Fortunately, Laura, being the brilliant woman that she is, thought to buy a book pre-trip that would be easy to pick up and drop just as easily without worrying about remembering silly details like characters or setting or plot. The result this go round: Twitterature.
Twitterature is a humor book that takes over eighty works of literature and rewrites them in 20 “tweets” or less from the perspective of the lead character. If you’ve heard of Twitter (seriously, everybody HAS to have at least heard of it), but don’t understand how it works, imagine a crappy version of Facebook where they take away everything but status updates and limit users to 140 characters per update. The books tackled range from classics like Hamlet to modern fair such as The Da Vinci Code to books so old we don’t even know who wrote them (Beowulf).
The front of the book features a quote from The Wall Street Journal that states, “Do you hear that? It’s the sound of Shakespeare, rolling over in his grave.” The other quotes on the first page continue this streak of honesty:
“Sincerest apologies to Shakespeare, Stendhal, and Joyce: how were we to know it would come to this?” – Mashable.com
“Twitterature makes me want to punch someone, preferably the ‘authors.’ They’re in Chicago. I’m gonna take a road trip.” – @damig, Twitter
“Just f***ing shoot me now.” – Mike C., grouchyconservativepundits.com
While I see where they’re coming from, it still doesn’t stop the fact that the book had both of us laughing out loud on a regular basis. You could choose to view it is as the ultimate low in disrespect or a perfect high for geeks around the country. While the cover and introduction play the comedy angle where the purpose of the book is to simplify boringly long books for an ADD generation, we realized as we went through that it only really worked for the books we had previously read.
Really, we only read about 75% of them after this discovery – sticking solely with the ones we read in school, for fun, or were at the very least familiar with (I’ve never read nor will ever read Twilight, but you can bet your ass we read the Twitterature for it). If you want an awesome coffee table book or find yourself in need of something to make a roadtrip a little shorter, I absolutely would give this a vote. If you can’t find the humor in this idea, you need to lighten up. Funny is funny. Anyone that doesn’t already have an appreciation for the books lampooned on these pages isn’t going to get it. No one is going to use Twitterature to pretend they’re suddenly a scholar, so let’s not go numbering the signs of the apocalypse just yet.
Laura and I headed back to my hometown of Rocky Mount this past weekend to attend my little brother’s Homecoming. It’s a two hour drive each way, and thanks to a little Southern Snowstorm, we ended up with six total hours to blow. Fortunately, Laura, being the brilliant woman that she is, thought to buy a book pre-trip that would be easy to pick up and drop just as easily without worrying about remembering silly details like characters or setting or plot. The result this go round: Twitterature.
Twitterature is a humor book that takes over eighty works of literature and rewrites them in 20 “tweets” or less from the perspective of the lead character. If you’ve heard of Twitter (seriously, everybody HAS to have at least heard of it), but don’t understand how it works, imagine a crappy version of Facebook where they take away everything but status updates and limit users to 140 characters per update. The books tackled range from classics like Hamlet to modern fair such as The Da Vinci Code to books so old we don’t even know who wrote them (Beowulf).
The front of the book features a quote from The Wall Street Journal that states, “Do you hear that? It’s the sound of Shakespeare, rolling over in his grave.” The other quotes on the first page continue this streak of honesty:
“Sincerest apologies to Shakespeare, Stendhal, and Joyce: how were we to know it would come to this?” – Mashable.com
“Twitterature makes me want to punch someone, preferably the ‘authors.’ They’re in Chicago. I’m gonna take a road trip.” – @damig, Twitter
“Just f***ing shoot me now.” – Mike C., grouchyconservativepundits.com
While I see where they’re coming from, it still doesn’t stop the fact that the book had both of us laughing out loud on a regular basis. You could choose to view it is as the ultimate low in disrespect or a perfect high for geeks around the country. While the cover and introduction play the comedy angle where the purpose of the book is to simplify boringly long books for an ADD generation, we realized as we went through that it only really worked for the books we had previously read.
Really, we only read about 75% of them after this discovery – sticking solely with the ones we read in school, for fun, or were at the very least familiar with (I’ve never read nor will ever read Twilight, but you can bet your ass we read the Twitterature for it). If you want an awesome coffee table book or find yourself in need of something to make a roadtrip a little shorter, I absolutely would give this a vote. If you can’t find the humor in this idea, you need to lighten up. Funny is funny. Anyone that doesn’t already have an appreciation for the books lampooned on these pages isn’t going to get it. No one is going to use Twitterature to pretend they’re suddenly a scholar, so let’s not go numbering the signs of the apocalypse just yet.