August 09, 2004

Book-A-Minute Classics! Feed your head in under 60 seconds (or, probably, less). Great expectations, Jane Eyre, Light in August and the collected works of E.E. Cummings, others.
posted by pete_best 20 years ago
  • Beowulf: "Let's build a big old dining hall and call it Herot. (They do. Then Grendel, an ugly guy, takes over Herot and eats people. Beowulf rips his arm off.) All You rule, Beowulf. (Some people make SPEECHES and tell IRRELEVANT STORIES. Beowulf kills some more STUFF.) Beowulf Wiglaf, I'm dying. See that my funeral pyre fits my greatness. Wiglaf Ok." I love it!!
  • in a similar vein, the L337 5p34k romeo & Juliet here
  • The "To Build A Fire" by Jack London one is priceless, "Sometimes you need to build a fire to keep warm, but you can't, and you freeze to death" ))) for you.
  • My favorite is for Moll Flanders. I always had a terrible time remembering what happened in that book. (NB: the title on the link is the actual title of Defoe's novel)
  • As an English teacher, maybe I shouldn't admit this -- but my favorite is actually on the Movie-A-Minute site: Replacement Killers.
  • Gravity's Rainbow By Thomas Pynchon A screaming thing comes across the sky. It's a V-2 rocket carrying twelve thousand pounds of symbolism, and it's coming down on your poor, deluded, postmodern head. THE END bwhaaaaaaaaaa ha haha!!!!
  • Don't forget the Sci-Fi section of Book-A-Minute! My first encounter with this site was several years ago, when I was idly Googling for Thomas Covenant information (what can I say?). The Minute summary is absolutely priceless and accurate.
  • All that time in English Lit..... wasted!
  • Dante's Inferno made me let out a loud chuckle. My coworkers are all looking at me. I hope they don't try to invite me to join some cult...
  • I think the Catcher in the Rye entry is an unwarranted slur on one of the greatest novels of this century and also hilariously true. Hamlet, on the other hand, is really sold short (ha ha!) by the suggestion that he's the only one who dies. What about all the other people he took with him, huh? Does wholesale slaughter count for nothing these days? My own version of Heart of Darkness is even shorter: White men. Africa. "The horror, the horror!"
  • The one for The Pearl truly doesn't explain how painfully boring the book is. The Huckleberry Finn one is pretty good, though.
  • I think the Catcher in the Rye entry is an unwarranted slur on one of the greatest novels of this century and also hilariously true. Add gunfire and it's also a dead-on condensed version of Reservoir Dogs. Less condensed more of the same here.