Assimilate book-ism to webism and the book looks like nothing so much as an unreadably long, out of date, & non-interactive blog post. . . Web 2.0 has been revelatory in lots of ways—user-generated naked photos, for one—but the torrent of writing from ordinary folks has certainly been one of the most transfixing. Over the past five years the great American public has blogged and Tweeted and commented up a storm and fulfilled a great modernist dream: the inclusion, the reproduction, the self-representation of the masses.
posted by four panels
on May 4, 2010 -
15 comments
“We realised that life is too short to read all the books you want to and we never were going to read these ones.” Research confirmed that “many regular readers think of the classics as long, slow and, to be frank, boring. You’re not supposed to say this but I think that one of the reasons Jane Austen always does so well in reader polls is that her books aren’t that long”.
The first six titles in the
Compact Editions series are
Anna Karenina,
Vanity Fair,
David Copperfield,
The Mill on the Floss,
Moby Dick and
Wives and Daughters.
Each has been whittled down to about 400 pages by cutting 30 to 40 per cent of the text. Words, sentences, paragraphs and, in a few cases, chapters have been removed.
“We realised that life is too short to read all the books you want to and we never were going to read these ones.”
posted by four panels
on May 7, 2007 -
270 comments
