The latest batch of Penguin Classics are out now! Another 50 are now on sale and they include Sartre’s The Age of Reason, Dracula by Bram Stoker, A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (one of my favourite books) and Nick Cave’s And the Ass Saw the Angel (another favourite of mine).
Coincidentally (or not), two freshman students at the University of Chicago have scored a book deal with Penguin for ‘Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books, Now Presented in Twenty Tweets or Less’. The book will apparently be a ‘humorous retelling’ of various literary classics in 140 characters or less. Dante, Stendhal, Shakespeare and Joyce have all been mentioned.
Emmett Rensin and Alex Aciman’s so-called revolution started in their college dorm. Their idea is to combine two great pillars of our society – literature and Twitter. They believe our love for high literature can be indulged despite our short attention spans.
Whatever. It will be interesting to see if readers are that keen to see The Divine Comedy or Romeo and Juliet reduced to a series of tweets. In fact, readers will presumably have read the classics in question anyway, otherwise, how will they get the joke?
And surely compiling the tweets in a book is contradictory to the spirit of Twitter – I can’t see myself lying in bed with a cup of tea and my laptop reading tweets, as I would with a book. (No offence intended to those of you who do.) I think the ‘joke’ would be more amusing if it were shared on the forum that led to the idea rather than published as a book.
I think I’ll stick with reading the unabridged versions. After all, they're only $10!
Comments