 | Title: Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books Retold Through Twitter. Author: Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin Rating: 4/5 Book: 0/50 (0% completed) Pages: 145 pgs/15,000 pgs (1.00% completed) Total Pages 145 pages Twitterature is a rather funny book, an anti-book even, some might say. It is attempt to rewrite a large number of the great classical stories following the Twitter micro-blog format (i.e., short postings limited to 140 symbols per posting). The authors took about fifty books (did they know about  50bookchallenge?), ranging from The Iliad and The Epic of Gilgamesh through Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolstoy, Proust and many others, up to Kerouac, and tried to retell these stories in about 20-25 tweets each. |
The result is not so much truncated micro-digests, but rather translations of the texts into a different language, or a dialect, as if they are re-told by a particular voice, purportedly a typical Twitter user (i.e., promiscuous, egocentric, antisocial and often drug abuse prone grown-up). You need to know not only the Twitter's lingo (@, D, hashtags etc), but be somewhat familiar with the sub-subculture where 'pwned douchebags' и '< /3 cock-blocks' are 'totally used'.
As often happens with such projects, some texts are the gems, witty and original, and some are so-so. I personally liked Alice (I'm pretty bored. Oh! A white rabbit! Just like in The Matrix!), Kafka's Metamorphosis, many pieces by Shakespeare, Swift's Gulliver's Travels and a few more. As a native Russian reader, I can praise some of the retwitted Russian authors; Gogol's Overcoat is a masterpiece of irony:
@StaticBureacracy
Seriously, check out pics on my Flickr! This coat is so money, it doesn't even know how money it is.
But again, I find the humor of some other Russian retwits a bit questionable. All in all, it's a book worth browsing through if you have a spare hour and want some lulz. W/e.
And yes - Happy New Year and best wishes to all here!
