Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books Retold Through Twitter

by Alexander Aciman

Perhaps you once asked yourself, 'What exactly is Hamlet trying to tell me? Why must he mince his words, muse in lyricism and, in short, whack about the shrub?' No doubt such troubling questions would have been swiftly resolved were the Prince of Denmark a registered user on Twitter.com. This, in essence, is Twitterature.

Here you will find seventy-five of the greatest works of western literature – from Beowulf to Bronte, from Kafka to Kerouac, and from Dostoevsky to Dickens– each distilled through the voice of Twitter to its purest, pithiest essence. Including a full glossary of online acronyms and Twitterary terms to aid the amateur, Twitterature provides everything you need to master the literature of the civilised world, while relieving you of the burdensome task of reading it.

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.

'The classics are so last century' Guardian

Genres: Humor, Nonfiction, Classics, Books About Books, Comedy, Short Stories, Adult

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Emmett L. Rensin (left) and Alexander Aciman (right) are sophomores at the University of Chicago. Alex has contributed several essays to The New York Times, is a devoted follower of Napoleon Bonaparte, and is known on occasion to enjoy a game of Bocce, or Pugilism. Emmett is a Huffington Post contributor and an ordained reverend and is devoted to accomplishing his three life goals: penning the Great American Novel, mastery of card magic, and the creation of the perfect shaggy-dog joke."

Reviews

[emma · Rating 1 out of 5]

this book is basically if you took that silly bit that you do as a joke in like, group projects in high school english classes, where you act like hamlet is talking to ophelia in modern slang or whatever, but you were so convinced of your own genius that you thought it had to be published.

in other words: i have made half-hearted attempts at making strangers laugh at 7:38 a.m. that are roughly as worthy of literary recognition as this is.

maybe more.

part of a series i'm doing in which i review books i read a long time ago

[I am Bastet · Rating 1 out of 5]

In the interest of full disclosure, I only read some of these. I started out with the books I'd read, then I started skimming, then skipping over most of everything. The only even remotely funny one was Twilight, because that book is so surface level it's easy to make fun of.

What's wrong with this book is that to write effective parodies of literature, you have to actually understand the literature really well. This reads more like sparknotes in tweet form, and I can't help but feel like the authors of it only did read the sparknotes of most of these books. The tweet stories fell flat for me because they were all written in the same annoying internet voice and they didn't offer any insight into any of the books, or make fun of them very effectively, either. It's clearly a gimmick and it fails, because summing up classics in tweets full of LOL and WTF is not ironic or clever.

Mostly, it was boring and cringe worthy. A bunch of shallow, stupid summaries.

[Sue · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book does not "satirize" the classics. It outright mocks them and their authors and devotees with racist, misogynistic, and homophobic dude-bro humor. Disappointing. Don't waste your time.

[David Sarkies · Rating 3 out of 5]

Opening Up the Classics
16 November 2017

I've just landed up with a pair of reading glasses, namely because my Dad was pressuring me to go and get a glaucoma test, and everytime I go to an optometrist they always try to flog me a pair of glasses. Honestly, as far as I'm concerned I'm not walking into walls so I don't need glasses. However, a little game that a lot of medical practitioners play in Australia is 'bill the health insurer', and they will do it in such a way that I, the end consumer, don't have to pay anything. Well, since health insurers are more than happy to take our money, I decided to get something back, especially since it was nothing out of my pocket. Which means that I have this pair of glasses that honestly makes reading easier, but unless I'm staring at a book I simply cannot see anything otherwise, and whenever I take them off my eyes have to adjust to the fact that I don't have glasses on anymore, which is really annoying.

The reason I say this is because this is the first book that I read with my new (and free) glasses, though I'm not entirely sure whether this is something to mark down as a milestone because, honestly, I would rather not wear them (even though they do make reading easier). However, I probably should talk more about this book than about the pros and cons of reading glasses (that make me literally blind unless I am staring at a book).

At first I was going to write this book off after reading a couple of reviews, and in part they are right – the turning of classic novels into two page summaries using Twitter posts and Twitter lingo does become dry after a while. However, when I stood back and thought about what he was doing, I have to admit that it is quite clever. The thing is that the book is quite short, and you can probably get through it in a single reading. Okay, the Twitter lingo can be a little confusing if you aren't all that familiar with it, and if you are already engrossed in classic literature, then the book is probably going to start to wear quite thin quite quickly.

However, after I finished the book I decided to look at it from another perspective – that of somebody who really hasn't considered reading the classics. Okay, there have been lots of people throughout history who, while being able to read, have not been interested in the classics. This book is designed to change this. Honestly, your average Twitterati is probably not going to suddenly grab War and Peace and start reading it, especially if their attention span is limited to 140 characters. In a way the person who only ever reads the newspaper and maybe a gossip rag is hardly going to start reading Anna Karena. However, there are people out there that read modern stories and simply consider classics to be boring and dull.

This book is designed to change at opinion.

Take Sherlock Holmes for instance – every second line had him snorting cocaine. Some have suggested that this is going way overboard, especially since Holmes' cocaine habit is mention only a few times. However, the main reason that I ended up reading Sherlock Holmes (other than because of Guy Ritchie) was that I discovered that he was a coke fiend and spent his spare time in brothels. Suddenly this character that I had always assumed as being rather boring turned out to be a lot more interesting than I anticipated. As such I have now read all of the Sherlock Holmes books. The other thing is that there was quite a few classic works of literature involving people having affairs (and even having babies to people not their husband). In a way I would never have thought of Madame Bovary as being about a woman that becomes bored with her husband and starts sleeping around (not that I'm all that interested in such books, but there are many out there who are).

The same thing was the case with the Odyssey. Here was I, back in my early twenties, who had pretty much only had a diet of fantasy novels suddenly discovering that there is this ancient story about a guy who sails around the Mediterranean fighting all sorts of monsters, and even poking the eye out of a Cyclops. In fact, it was this discovery that sent me wanting to read more, and more, ancient literature. Suddenly, the Forgotten Realms books simply were not all that interesting. As for Shakespeare, we have a stories where at the end of the play the stage is littered with corpses – and they said Lethal Weapon was violent.

While this book may not be for everyone, it is something that if it trigger's a readers interest in maybe reading beyond the Mills and Boons then it has done its job.

Oh, and I don't have glaucoma.

[Gerry · Rating 1 out of 5]

I am not a Twitter fan at the best of times and I don't use it. Now I know why. 'Twitterature' purports to be 'The World's Greatest Books Retold Through Twitter' - well, the best of luck because, even books that I have read make little sense through the twitter comments and those books not read are almost completely meaningless or senseless. And the comments are nearly all certainly unfunny. I appreciate it could be me being something of a Luddite as far as Twitter is concerned!

I feel sure that there is something clever in being able to tweet such things about books but they do nothing for me and when initials are used to state something, I usually haven't a clue what they mean; I only know such simple ones as LOL and OMG and (although I don't want to know!) WTF, which I do not like the use of!

For 'Sherlock Holmes' I read, 'Puffing the pipe. A pounding at the door. Go away. Woman in distress, crying. Watson terrorised the fair sex again? No. Perhaps a mystery.' Yes, perhaps a mystery because I wonder what all that is about. And one of my favourite books 'The Three Musketeers' has 'I have to go on a diamond heist with my boyz. Athos is riding shotgun in the carriage.' So what? And although the first part of this next one is rather sensible, the rest leaves me cold, 'Aramis wants to be a priest. Maybe I shouldn't have said all that nasty stuff about the clergy and little boys.'

There is the odd mildly amusing comment in 146 pages but this book is definitely not for me. I will be sending it to a charity shop for someone else to analyse ... or pass on!

[Scott · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was a good idea, but poorly executed. Their claim that they "twitterize" classics was a bit of an exaggeration; I'd like to think that I'm pretty well-read, and I hadn't heard of a third of the books listed in here. Despite that, even for the books that I know very well, the tweets were just not all that clever. In some cases, they went for the easy jokes rather than actually parodying the story. I agree with the reviews on the front page - this really does not bode well for the future generations.

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is a great idea. Seriously.

These two college freshman took all the great works of literature and condensed them into about 20 tweets, all 140 characters or less. The result, at times, is pretty funny.

However, there was excessive swearing and sexual innuendo and most of it was done in tweets for books that didn't need it. I can understand using it in, say, Dracula or Catcher in the Rye -- those types. However, this was clearly done just for "humor" and "shock value." I don't understand why using swear words every other word is funny.

I would have liked this book a whole lot more if it had been hilarious without falling back on the idea that cursing is funny. There's really little need for Jane Austen characters to be using the f-word and such. Same with Harry Potter. There are other ways to make people laugh. Make it funny because it's funny, not because you have to rely on shocking people.

I gave it 2 stars because there WAS a lot funny about it, but I was annoyed a lot of the time too.

[Sarah · Rating 1 out of 5]

No.

Just NO.

Why was this horrible thing created?! How did this get published?!!? So many of these were just plain offensive to mass groups of people. Perhaps if this book was trying to show what was wrong with society, this may have worked. But it is clear that this book's (if you can even call this piece of crap a book) purpose was to just make a mockery of classic literature. Going into this, I thought that this would be funny. Actually genuinely funny, not offensive-funny, which isn't funny at all. Very few even got me to crack a smile--and these were the most mild of them. Also, as you went on, they just became so repetitive and it became a chore to read them.
I recommend this thing to absolutely no one. I would give it like half of a star if I could. The half star would simply be because this was a good idea, just horribly executed.

[Nicky · Rating 3 out of 5]

Twitterature is pretty fun and light-hearted. Don't read it if you don't like the idea of fun being poked at classic books, or things like Sherlock Holmes' use of cocaine to be emphasised, etc. The humour wears a little thin after you've read a lot of them, and it's easiest to appreciate when you've already read the classic in question.

I think this'd be more fun to dip into than to actually sit down and read straight through.

[Cindy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Got this from my Penguin niece. Yes, she's a penguin.
___________

Tons of fun, very clever, but does get a little same-y if you read too many at once. It must have been riotously fun following the re-telling of great literature live on Twitter. All compiled into one dead-tree book, the wit loses its edge. However, I do really look forward to re-reading individual abridgments after reading the classic they are parodying.

[Milliebot · Rating 1 out of 5]

This review and others posted over at my blog.

From the cover: amalgamation of “twitter” and “literature”; humorous reworkings of literary classics for the twenty-first century intellect, in digestible portions of 20 tweets or fewer.

If you, dear reader, like me, thought you’d be delving into a clever and witty little book of old texts reborn with a modern twist via social media, then you, like me, would be incredibly disappointed. I expected that this book would reflect an appreciation and understanding of the classics with modern-day insights from the characters within the novels. I expected to chuckle or even laugh when reading this (as I often do when reading jokes on my current Twitter timeline). In short, I expected too much from this book.

What I received (fortunately in exchange for less than $3.50 courtesy of Book Outlet) instead, was a crass, harshly satiric and mildly offensive batch of tweets that don’t honor the original works. Let me preface the rest of this review by saying I don’t mind vulgar language or content, when appropriate to the work, nor do I mind my favorite classics being adapted into clever retellings (Pride, Prejudice and Zombies anyone?) or even poked fun at.

Twitterature seems to simply mercilessly make fun of or criticize the classics within, dubbing the originals as overly long and boring. In their introduction Aciman and Rensin touch on how the classics are outdated and hard to understand and that this book strives to remedy that by “present[ing] their most essential elements, distilled into the voice of Twitter.” They strive to give us “the means to absorb the strong voices, valuable lessons and stylistic innovations of the Greats without the burdensome duty of hours spent reading.” I think, in hindsight, that maybe their introduction is a bad joke as well.

I also want to say that I did not read this entire book (I'm not even going to count it as a book I read this year) – after reading the first three sections (Catcher in the Rye, The Da Vinci Code and Paradise Lost), I quickly grasped that this book was not at all what I thought it would be and I then proceeded to skip to books I’m familiar with. What’s the point in reading something that tears apart a work I’ve never read? But let me highlight some of the more bothersome tweets:

From Pride and Prejudice – “Isn’t it cool how I’m defying my gender role by standing up for myself?”
“He and I are wed and have moved to our own home in the country. I got the man, his money, and uh…women’s power!”

From Alice in Wonderland – “I don’t know what’s going on, but in a typically feminine manner, I’ll allow confusion and being flustered to make me cry up a storm.”
“I found a stoner Arab caterpillar. He made fun of me. Oh yeah? At least I’m not three inches tall with a case of the munchies.”

From Twilight – “Pretty boy is a vampire. A bit obvious, but I still feel such a hormonal pull. He’s pure pussy magnet.”
“My life lately has been a bit like a lonely girl’s slightly creepy juvenile sex fantasy. But at least it really happened!!!”

Last, and featuring what I found to be most offensive, from Jane Eyre – “I wish my parents had died impressively. Like Harry Potter, that kid’s got one hell of an orphan story.”
“The education is legit. Like we read books, but kids are dying of illness. This place is grimier than a hooker’s snatch.”
(In reference to Rochester’s wife) “The Kunta Kinte pyro bitch is dead. Maaaaawwwage!”

Seriously!?

It seems to me that rather than a funny, insightful twist on classics, readers are given bare-bones, spark notes-esque summaries, interjected with “modern language” (swearing and some “lols”), from people who don’t appreciate or even understand the classics. I’m glad I spent so little on this book, because I won’t be keeping it. Unless you hate the classics and want to read tweets that mostly make fun of them, I wouldn’t recommend this book.

Wait, let me rephrase my review in the spirit of this book: TBH guys, this book is fucking garbage. LOL #sucks

[Maria Regina Paiz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Such a pity, all the work Aciman went through in order to put out this book. Basically he took a bunch of classics and rewrote them in signature Twitter style: all retold in 20 tweets of 140 characters or less. Some lines are funny, yes... but after, say, 10 twitterized classics, they just become monotonous and boring. Nice try, though.

[Sara · Rating 1 out of 5]

Classic dudebro humour right here — most of the entries aren't even remotely funny. Don't bother.

[Lynda · Rating 2 out of 5]

Was a great idea. It wasn't that good.

[Johnny · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was seriously disappointing. I read the few sample tweets on the books website when I was setting up a Twitterature review assignment for my students, and the Hamlet and Harry Potter ones are pretty amusing (although I admittedly had to clean them up a bit as examples for my public high school sophomores). I checked this book out from the library as a lover of both literature and wit, but for the most part the collections of tweets are an adolescent romp through Western literature. I would be surprised to discover that the authors were anything other than privileged white male college students. (I believe the back of the book at least identifies them as male undergraduates.) Many of the tweets play on misogynistic social views—and usually not in a satirical manner that calls out some of the oppression exercised by many pieces in the Western canon. The titular female in Lewis Carroll’s Alice's Adventures in Wonderland tweets, “I don’t know what’s going on, but in a typically feminine manner I’ll allow confusion and being flustered to make me cry up a storm” (166). While the women are reduced to emotional stereotypes and nymphomaniacs, the men are extremely juvenile and overly concerned with the phallus. The title character of Swift’s Gulliver's Travels tweets, “I don’t mean to boast; I’m not a terribly tall man. But these people of Lilliput are the size of a child’s johnson” (130) and later follows this up with “Oh dear! Woke up to see a gentleman over seventy feet tall. What a clever turn of events! Now I’m dick-sized” (131). These jokes could certainly play on the repressed sexuality in much of the literature written before the mid-twentieth century, yet it in Twitter-speak it reads as little more than bawdy puerility. There are elements of humor sprinkled throughout, but they are so few and far between that I wouldn’t even bother buying this as a gag gift for a fellow book lover. Of course, much of my feeling surrounding this book can be summed up in the blurbs that are cheekily included inside the cover

[Chris · Rating 2 out of 5]

Definitely written by college sophomores. Borderline funny. But just borderline.

[Paras2 · Rating 4 out of 5]

you know, it's a fast and fun read for those dull moments when u gotta wait for a few moments.
tho i only read the ones i've read before, didn't want to spoil anything for myself. :D

[Leni · Rating 1 out of 5]

Aktivt irriterende.

[Katja · Rating 4 out of 5]

Weltliteratur in 140 Zeichen - geht das?
Ich war anfangs etwas skeptisch, weil ich eigentlich nicht so dafür bin, dass man Klassiker der Literatur modernisieren sollte, aber ich twittere selber auch, also dachte ich mir, ich versuche es einfach mal und schaue, ob mir das Buch gefällt. Immerhin wird es ja mit dem "Muss für alle Twitter-Fans" beworben.

Und das Buch hat mich wirklich überrascht, weil es den Nagel wirklich auf den Kopf trifft. Der einzige Nachteil ist eben, dass durch die Verkürzung der Texte viel vom Sinn des Ursprungstextes verloren geht und man, wenn man das Orginal nicht wirklich kennt, Probleme haben könnte, die Tweets in einen Zusammenhang zu bringen. Andersseits kann das auch gerade ein Anreiz sein, sich mal mit dem Originalwerk auseinander zu setzen.

Die Tweets sind kurz - was klar ist, immerhin gibt es nur 140 verfügbare Zeichen, die man nutzen kann. Das Buch ist also eher etwas für die Menschen, die eben gerne mal etwas schmökern wollen. Durch diese Kürze lässt sich auch schwer etwas zum Stil der beiden jungen Autoren sagen, aber ich glaube, dass sie wissen, warum sie die Tweets ausgwählt habe. Inhaltlich passen sie auf jeden Fall zum Text des Orginals.

Besonders schön finde ich den Anhang, in dem nochmal alles etwas erklärt wird, wenn man jetzt mit dem Thema Twittern nicht so vertraut ist. Im Übrigen werden da auch nochmal alle Abkürzungen erklärt, die innerhalb des Buches vorkommen.

Fazit:
Das Buch ist für alle gemacht, die Literatur als Schnellgericht haben möchte, weil die Geschichten sind modern und knapp verpackt. Allerdings geht dabei auch an Tiefe der Geschichten verloren und das sehe ich als Nachteil an, wenn man den Orginaltext dahinter nicht kennt. Auf der anderen Seite kann das auch ein Anreiz sein, das Orignalwerk zu lesen.

[Michael · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ever wonder what Robinson Crusoe would tweet (he’s twitter name is @iamnotgilligan) about? Probably not, but wouldn’t it be interesting to read? Now you can. Twitterature is a book that takes some of the greatest novels and converts it into a twitter account. All those great books in literature converted into little updates, 140 characters of less. Surprisingly it is very amusing and a lot of fun to read; especially if you’ve read the original. They are some great novels in this book such as;

* Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
* The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
* Dracula by Bram Stoker
* Emma by Jane Austen
* Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
* Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
* The Inferno by Dante
* Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
* Paradise Lost by John Milton
* The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
* Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
* Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
* Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very funny and irreverent. Definitely for those who are both used to Twitter and have read the majority of the books (there's only one title in the book I havcn't read - The Devil in the Flesh by Raymond Radiguet - and that book's set of tweets didn't make nearly as much sense as the others. I did hear someone say something about how this is the next evolution in Cliff's Notes/Sparknotes and I beg to differ; this definitely won't help you pass a test or write your term paper. It's just a fun way to comment on some established pieces of literature.

(For some reason Twitterature also highlights the number of sexual incidents in the books - probably due to the whole 20-tweets-or-less thing and the authors are male; I definitely would have tweeted Pride and Prejudice differently to take advantage of the irony)

[Kirsti · Rating 2 out of 5]

Works of literature reimagined as tweets. I wasn't that impressed with the book, but I was impressed that two college freshmen could come up with this idea, write the book, and sell it to Penguin Books. Go U of C kids.

From Ender's Game: "At times I feel inadequate but then realize I'm doing pretty well for an eight-year-old with a murder in my past and an army at my command."

From Watchmen: "Must break into a military facility and visit Doctor Manhattan. I hate seeing him, he's always waving his big blue dong around."

From Frankenstein: "I often think of the craziest thing I could get away with using my MD."

From A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: "I'm glad this whole narrative thing is coming so naturally, and didn't take a decade of work and drink and poverty."

[Sheela · Rating 1 out of 5]

I've granted one-star to this book because the concept is clever. Taking classic books and making them into 140-character tweets (IN THEORY) is a brilliant idea, but in actuality, authors such as Jane Austen and J.D. Salinger are rolling in their graves. The whole book just seemed like it came to fruition as part of an "end of the year school assignment" and to think some publisher thought it would be fantastic to bring it to publication...well, he/she should be fired. This was an abomination to all great literature! And I'm not even a literary freak. In fact, it made me feel pretty bad about myself for not having read so many of the classic books that have been tweet-ified.

I understand the authors were trying to be facetious, and facetious (borderline obnoxious) they were! I think all would have been forgiven if the tweets were actually funny, but they weren't.

[Katharina · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was such a disappointment. I gave the second star pretty much only for the idea behind it, because that idea should have resulted in a really cool book. But it didn't.
There are a few lines that made me laugh, but mostly the writers just think they're being a lot more witty than they actually are, going for easy jokes instead of actual parody.
This would have been a 4 or 5 star book if (someone with a sense of humor and talent for parody like) Cleolinda had written it.

[Eeva · Rating 2 out of 5]

The idea of this book is very clever and I was excited to read it, but unfortunately it's written so poorly that I'm surprised that any publishing house decided to publish it. The fact that Penguin decided to do it jus baffles me.

To appreciate this book you have to be on one hand super well read, but on the other have a sense of humour of a 13yo that laught at dick jokes.

There are few funny tweets (Wuthering Heights and Lolita especially) but every book is tweeded in the exact same language and the exact same style it gets boring after 10 minutes.

[Amy Murphy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really liked the idea of this book when I read the introduction, I always enjoy modernisations, and the idea of literature through modern media is really interesting for me. But I didn't think the book gave true "translations" of classic stories like it claimed, since it included inside meta jokes and judgements on the original stories. Furthermore, I thought the Twittter language didn't feel authentic or modern enough to really achieve its purpose.

[Oksana Uskova · Rating 2 out of 5]

Взяла книжку, як такий собі "майстер-клас для smm-щика", але повністю розчарувалася. Цікава ідея - переказати класику сучасною мовою у форматі твітів з підколами та сарказом. Виконання - вульгарно та не смішно. В анотації написано, що авторам по 19 років, і це відчувається. Хлопці просто не витягнули круту ідею. Шкода, але буває.

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Favorites were Harry Potter (1-7), The Hobbit, and Eugene Onegin. Unfortunately the LOLZ did not entirely outweigh the groans, the fact that it's written by a couple of college boys would explain the fact that the humor is overwhelmingly 'dudish'.

[Juno · Rating 2 out of 5]

the concept was fun but I think I am just far too old to enjoy it for more than 5 minutes. I also found the casual use of the word 'retard' jarring.... I think it has almost fallen out of use in the UK (I hope I'm right)

[Flyingbroom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very funny indeed. Especially if you've read the classics mentioned in the book.