As a Twitter addict (you can follow me here!) I was delighted to receive Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin's Twitterature: the world's greatest books retold through Twitter (Penguin) as a Christmas present. Starting with Paradise Lost and ending with Canterbury Tales the authors provide a pithy rewriting of seventy-five of the greatest works of Western literature. A slight nag to me was that they weren't in chronological order. I wanted to start with the ancients and move through and I did just that picking about for Vergil and Homer and Euripides before I moved onto more recent works. I was originally having to ask my niece to translate some of the online acronyms until I was told there was a very useful glossary!
It did raise the issue for me (and cookbooks do it too) of when is a book read or not read. I read bits and pieces of this book over a few weeks and am sure that I haven't read it all. But it simply isn't the sort of book you pick up and read from start to finish. Can I count Twitterature as a book I have read if I potter my way in and out of it and graze on bits that interest me at the time?
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