Twitterature ~ Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin

This was a gift from Millie last Christmas and it has sat on my shelf waiting for the right moment to read it. It’s not a very long book, just shy of one hundred and fifty pages, so I decided that it would be a good book to try to break me out of my reading slump. It took me a lot longer than I thought to read, but I think it might have gotten rid of my reader’s block, so it served its purpose.

Twitterature is a compilation of sixty classic novels, each retold through a series of tweets. Each classic novel spans two or three pages and has around fifteen tweets.

This book was a load of fun to read but I did find that it took a bit of brainpower to process what I was reading. For the stories that I have not read or are not familiar with, I found it a little tricky to put together a complete picture of the plot after I deciphered the tweets. Twitterature was originally published in 2009 and uses some of the online language used back then. The language we use in tweets today has changed a lot in some aspects and not at all in others. Some of it was like reading the internet’s version of Shakespearean English. It was a lot of fun and a challenge that I quite enjoyed. I will say I’m glad that some things did die out of everyday internet language. 

It’s hard to say much about this book because there isn’t much you can say without going into specifics about some of the tweets and then that starts to infringe on spoiler territory. I will say that this book was a load of fun and a great way to make fun of the old-fashioned ideals in classic novels. I give it four out of five stars.

C🌙