Catching up on one’s reading…
As Labor Day draws near, your correspondent suspects that at least some readers are staring dolefully (as he is) at the list of still-unread books that were meant to be the meat of the summer. Well, thanks to Book-A-Minute, relief is at hand!
From Classics (“When even the Cliff’s Notes are just too long…”) through SciFi (“Your favorite science fiction and fantasy stories at lightspeed…”) to bedtime books (“Read to your kids without plodding through every last word of those eight page epics…”)– it’s all there.
By way of example, Charlotte Bronte’s heaving Jane Eyre:
(People are MEAN to Jane Eyre.)
Edward Rochester:
I have a dark secret. Will you stay with me no matter what?
Jane Eyre:
Yes.
Edward Rochester:
My secret is that I have a lunatic wife.
Jane Eyre:
Bye.
(Jane Eyre leaves. Somebody dies. Jane Eyre returns.)
(While condensation does have its costs, it can in some cases be– as this example demonstrates– an improvement on the original…)
Tick those tomes off the list at Book-A-Minute.
As we transcend Evelyn Wood, we might spare a thought for Kate Chopin, obvious fan of Flaubert and author of Book-A-Minute candidate The Awakening: on this date in 1904, she spent a long day at the St. Louis World’s Fair, where she suffered the cerebral hemorrhage from which she would die, aged 54, two days later.
