Haiku U: From Aristotle to Zola, 100 Great Books in 17 Syllables

by David M. Bader

Take a hilarious crash course in literature—just three pithy lines—from a bestselling haiku humorist.

Why spend weeks slogging through The Iliad when you could just read the haiku? From Homer to Faulkner to Lao Tzu, the Great Books are now within the reach of even the shortest attention spans. Show off your literary prowess at cocktail parties with minimal prep time, thanks to the author of the popular Haikus for Jews.

In the sixteenth century, Zen monks in Japan developed the haiku, a poem consisting of three unrhymed lines of five, seven, and five syllables. Little did they know that their ancient art form was destined to become a handy tool for today’s time-crunched Western reader!

Reducing eyestrain and deforestation, Haiku U. distills dialogue and plot, capturing the essence of our favorite literary classics, seventeen syllables at time:

Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past:
Tea-soaked madeleine—
a childhood recalled. I had
brownies like that once.

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre:
O woe! His mad wife—
in the attic! Had they but
lived together first.

Just in time for graduation, Haiku U. gives the gift of an entire literary canon, packed into one hilarious gem.

Genres: Poetry, Humor, Books About Books, Classics, Nonfiction, Literature, Japanese Literature

112 pages, Hardcover

First published March 31, 2005

About the author

Also published as David Bader
Manhattan attorney turned haiku humourist, David Bader is author of several US cult hits Haikus for Jews: For You, a Little Wisdom and Zen Judaism: For You, a Little Enlightenment. He lives and counts syllables in New York City.

Reviews

[Manny · Rating 5 out of 5]

He mocks the classics.
But, somehow, respectfully.
No spinning in graves.

___________________________________________

I was struck by the following passage in Huysmans's A Rebours:

Bien souvent, des Esseintes avait médité sur cet inquiétant problème, écrire un roman concentré en quelques phrases qui contiendraient le suc cohobé des centaines de pages toujours employées à établer le milieu, à dessiner les caractères, à entasser à l'appui les observations et les menus faits. Alors les mots choisis seraient tellment impermutables qu'ils suppléeraient à tous les autres : l'adjective posé d'une si définitive façon qu'il ne pourrait être légalement dépossédé de sa place, ouvrirait de telles perspectives que le lecteur pourrait rêver, pendant des semaines entières, sur son sens, tout à la fois précis et multiple, constaterait le présent, reconstruirait le passé, devinerait l'avenir d'âmes des personnages, révélés par les lueurs de cette épithète unique.

At the time, clearly just a dream, but modern technology has now caught up with him. Isn't that amazing?

[Gerry · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's a precis of a book and then there's hiaku! What a great, and very speedy, way to get through 100 books. I'm sorry I can only claim one read having read it.

This Japanese art of haiku provides a 17 syllable summary in three lines of five, seven and five syllables respectively, of works as diverse as Sophocles' Oedipus Rex to Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.

It does help sometimes to have an idea of what the original work is about so as to more readily pick up on the abbreviated version that does, quite naturally, have a number of cuts in it!

And for someone like myself who has, shamelessly, never read War and Peace, I can at least say that I have read the hiaku version. And whatever Tolstoy (sometimes turgidly) wrote in 1,000+ pages is summed up with "Guns roar, Russia burns/Where's Andrey? Who is Petya?/Confused. France retreats."

Get the idea? Great fun and challenging to produce one's own hiaku of other books read - I think I'll give that little exercise a miss!

[Tristan Kenney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant book, is
all one's best quips and lines
a lifetime of, herein.

[Nataliya Piletska · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of these haikus were absolute gems. I flicked the book open to a random page in the shop:

(The Importance of Being Earnest)
Earnestly posing
as Ernest, Jack learns he's named
Ernest in earnest.

I though it was a brilliant idea, and bought the book right away. The whole collection is filled with humorous little vignettes that do well to sum up great big novels in twenty words or less. I'll just type up a few of my favourites and let you judge for yourself:

(The Canterbury Tales)
Pilgrimmes on spryng braecke -
roadde trippe! Whoe farrtted? Yiuw didde.
Noe, naught meae. Yaes, yiuw.

(The Inferno)
Abandon all hope!
Looks like everyone's down here.
Omigod - the Pope!

(Hamlet)
'His mother wed his
dead murdered father's brother!'
Next Jerry Springer.

(Paradise Lost)
O'er and o'er God warned,
'Easte not th'Apple!' Man dids't and
God ballistick went.

I feel I should leave it at that before I write up the entire book. But yes, very quick read, gave me a good few laughs, and earned me a few funny looks on the bus. It would make a great present for a bookworm.

[LJ · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm so glad I found this collection of poetry! Comical reviews of great classic books, done in just 17 syllables. Had a lot of fun reading this!
A must have for any classic literature lovers.

This one in particular gave me a good laugh:

-Pride and Prejudice-
Single white lass seeks,
landed gent for marriage, whist,
No parsons, thank you.

[Addie · Rating 3 out of 5]

read inside bookshop
short and rather amusing
but inaccurate

[Helen · Rating 5 out of 5]

What is so great about this book, is that the poems capture the true essences of the great books it describes! Amazing!

[Ashley · Rating 5 out of 5]

For fans of Great Books, this is a witty collection worth thumbing through. Many made me laugh out loud. A few favorites-

St. Augustine's "Confessions":
This is just to say
I screwed around. Forgive me.
I enjoyed it so.

Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot":
Act I. "It's hopeless.
My boots don't fit. Where is God?"
Act II. The same thing.

Henry David Thoreau's "Walden"
Morning: Pond-gazing.
Afternoon: Berry-picking.
What a hectic day.

[Matthew · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a very entertaining short book which I read within ten minutes. While it is clearly not a work of classic literature, it is still a nice breath of fresh air from the density of traditional works. That breath, however, doesn't last awfully long.

4/5

[Patti · Rating 3 out of 5]

I laughed so hard in the library I had to leave.
The poems are pretty uneven, but there are enough really funny ones to make this little 10 minute read well worth it.

[Natasha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved it! Hard to pick a favourite, but The Metamorphosis is one of them: “‘What have I become?’”/Uncertain, Gregor Samsa/puts out some feelers”.

[Jenna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow. I don't know what I was expecting going into this book but it exceeded all my expectations. This was incredibly funny to read and I appreciated and enjoyed David Bader's humour in his haikus so much! Some of the haikus tried to capture the language and the theme of the book and I loved it.

Of course, these haikus weren't a very good summary of the originals so I found that I had learnt nothing new about these works after finishing this book (as it is to be expected from a collection of 17 syllable poems). I most enjoyed reading the haikus for the works that I was familiar with because I could actually appreciate the humour and the cleverness of the poems. Sadly, there weren't very many of the 100 books that I was actually familiar with. Some of them were kind of obscure and I had never heard of them. But overall, I enjoyed this very much and it was a very, very quick read.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

You know how, when you're browsing in a book store, some titles just grab you? And you pick the book up, wondering if the book actually fits the title? Well, that's what happened here. I flipped to a random page, laughed out loud (and btw, don't you just love book stores where, when you laugh out loud, the people around you don't look at you like you're crazy, but instead smile and want to know what you're reading). Ditto for a second page. So of course I had to buy the book.

A witty good read,
Bader's book will delight all
Who explore its pages.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

So good. The cleverest kind of humour, biting and fun without being disrespectful. Kind of begs the question, is a classic not just an old book, that for one reason or another - and sometimes that reason is, in fact, its age - has stood the test of time? Why should they be above a bit of gentle, intelligent ribbing?

My favourite lines were “all adulterers receive / free monogramming” and “nobles down, serfs up.” A joy to read and a wonderful way to dip my toes into the world of poetry, I think!

[flajol · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read this in my lunch hour at the library. Amusing, with one or two really spot-on. I suspect I'd get more out of this if I'd read all the books it refers to.

[Di · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is genius. It's so funny. I especially love the haiku for Clarissa and Dante's Inferno.

[Erikka · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliant! Not as many well known books as I would like (many are super obscure) but it was still funny and worth a quick read.

[Wendy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very amusing!

[Elly · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was feeling a bit down and this cheered me right up.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very clever. I think my favourite is possibly the Kafka one.

"What have I become?"
Uncertain, Gregor Samsa
puts out some feelers.

:-)

[Kyo · Rating 5 out of 5]

You know, this was a surprising end-of-the-year favourite of mine! I picked this up very cheaply at a book sale, having leaved through it and thinking it pretty funny! I read this in one sitting when I got home and it pleasantly surprised me! It would have been so easy to just pitch this book and make a half-hearted attempt at haiku with some kind of summary of the books, but I really felt like Bader thought about the book themselves and how they work, function and exist in our common thought and really interacted with that! Waiting for Godot has the same kind of structure as the play and the one on Edward Gibbon's Roman history (I'm not typing out the full title) has footnotes at every word who are also well-thought out!

So, simply put, a funny and well-thought out little book about some of the most famous books in the world!

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

I snort laughed at this more times than I care to admit.

[G.G. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Call me humorless, but the only haiku-summaries of great books I found amusing as intended were those of books I haven't read. On Newton's Principia Mathematica, for example:
"Cherry blossoms fall/with Force equal to Mass times/Acceleration."
But The Tale of Genji as:
"Two wives, ten consorts--/under the wisteria,/many warm futons."
Sorry, no, no, no!

[Tiffany · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some books like this -- books that try to summarize or parody classic books in a funny way -- fall flat, but this one worked for me. There were quite a few of the haiku that I giggled out loud over.

My favorites:
Homer's The Iliad
Homer's The Odyssey
Copernicus' De Revolutionibus Orbium Caelestium
St. Augustine's The Confessions (even better because it's also a take on William Carlos Williams' "This Is Just To Say")
Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice
Shakespeare's Hamlet
Thomas Malthus' An Essay on the Principle of Population
Vatsayana's Kama Sutra
Thoreau's Walden, or, Life in the Woods
Henry James' Portrait of a Lady
Jack London's Call of the Wild
Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises

And for anyone who doesn't know what haiku is, learn from Bader's explanation: "In Japan, ... the seventeen-syllable haiku began to emerge. Developed by Zen monks possibly suffering from attention deficit disorder..." :)

[Stacey | prettybooks · Rating 3 out of 5]

I normally wouldn't pick up a book of poetry, but there's something about a haiku that I just love, so when I saw this little book of poems about classic literature, I knew I wanted it. But it was a couple of years before I actually picked it up!

One Hundred Great Books in Haiku is a super quick read – I read it in 20 minutes, as there's just one poem on each page. It's a fun introduction to great works of literature, from Homer's Odyssey to Orwell's 1984, but I found myself mostly only enjoying a haiku if I had already read the book (or knew the story).

As soon as I read this haiku about Little Women on the internet a few years ago, I knew I had to read the book. Beware, it is a spoiler!

Snowdrops hang like tears.
Shy, sweet, saintly Beth has died.
One down, three to go.

And I also loved this one on Hamlet:

'His mother wed his
dead murdered father's brother!'
Next Jerry Springer.

Why not have a go at writing your own haiku about book?

[Trudy Nye · Rating 4 out of 5]

One hundred classic works of literature boiled down to haiku form...seriously! They can't all be gems, of course, but some of these were laugh-out-loud funny. It obviously helps if you've read the originals, but it's not strictly necessary.

Sample: Bader's haiku on The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
"What have I become?"
Uncertain, Gregor Samsa
puts out some feelers.

You will want to write some of your own!

My haiku on Macbeth by William Shakespeare
Pushed by his crazed wife,
Macbeth kills to get power,
But the joke's on him.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can, finally, say that I have read Moby Dick. AND War and Peace. All in the same night, to boot.

I have a soft spot for literary pastiche and for this type of "literature summary" books; and the constraints of a haiku adds extra challenge. The poems are generally funny and there are some wickedly funny lines (my favourite is "choirboys learn to prey" - for Lord of the Flies). A nice way to spend an evening.

[Luzelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Probably would've enjoyed/appreciated this book more if I had read more classics than the very few I have.

[Peach · Rating 5 out of 5]

Classics condensed into haikus? Yes please.

"His mother wed his
Dead murdered father's brother!"
Next Jerry Springer.