Ram Review: Twitterature

I will not even pretend that I have read all the important books I should have. I dutifully got through the ones assigned in school and several more, but Great Expectations? Moby Dick? Twilight? Not so much. So when my roommate started reading twitterature, I was intrigued. Perhaps a book summarizing everything from King Lear to the Harry Potter septology to "Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" could provide enough information to get me through cocktail parties, and hopefully include more humor than Sparknotes.

Luckily, the potential for humor pulled through. Written in the rather snarky, tongue-in-cheek manner which I love, the book allots two to three pages, each with about seven to 12 tweets, per book, generally written from the protagonist's point of view. Some are genuinely descriptive of the plot ("This strange man has a secret about Rochester. He says that Rochester's got another wife locked in the attic!" from Jane Eyre), while others offer useless but hilarious commentary ("What do you mean ‘where am I? I'm right under the balcony! Does no one understand English anymore?" from Romeo and Juliet). The majority, however, offer a delightful mix ("I've got it. Rather than accept financial aid from my friend, I'll murder an elderly moneylender in cold blood. Why? I'm not telling." From Crime and Punishment). The tweets are wonderfully unorthodox, and often inappropriate, but so are many of the books they parody.

Though it is close behind Sparknotes in offering spoilers, I would never recommend using this book in place of studying. The tweets from the books I have not read were still enjoyable, but I was well aware that I was losing many of the nuances and references. Though they did give me a general idea about the plot, and at least a vague knowledge about the characters (though I am pretty sure F. Scott Fitzgerald is rolling in his grave with the reference to Gatsby as "G-Money"), I was often utterly confused as to what was going on. Conversely, the tweets of the stories I did know were hilarious, and the authors peppered them with apt popular culture references ("I love her, but if she's sitting alone in a castle there's something wrong with the girl. I don't want to marry Sylvia Plath over here" from Great Expectations). Even the usernames were carefully and cleverly chosen, with @TheRealDesperateHousewife for Madame Bovary and @GreekWithEnvy for Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.

Though certainly not the labor-intensive reading of the works it summarizes, twitterature is a fun, light read, perfect for a quick break in between analyzing the actual classics. In fact, I may pick up a few of those works that I have not read yet, if only so I can understand their tweets.