From Antigone to Lolita, from Beowulf to The Hobbit. The world's greatest literature is summarized in Maurice Sagoff's hilarious light verse. The result-70 intoxicating distillations of the classics everyone has been taking far too seriously for far too long. Selection of the Quality Paperback Book Club and a New York Times Best Seller. 180,000 copies in print.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0
I'm sorry I spent money on this!:
The author is more concerned with the cute little rhyme than in being true to the story. Poor quality printing leaves the colours smeared. Very bad value...
loved this book for years:
read this when it first came out. just recently was watching beowolf with an old friend
and we both immediately thought about shrinklits version. read it again when amazon delivered it....still funny after all these years.
Didn't help me as much as I'd hoped...:
I purchased this because I haven't read as many classic books as I've wanted to. I've always wanted to be classified as "well read." I thought this book would help me to get a brief overview of many classics that remain a mystery to me. The poetry is very cute and very well done. However, the only poetry I really understood was about the classics that I've already read. It was an amusing book, but it did not help me grasp the sense of books I haven't read. In order to make the meter and rhyme of the poems... more info
Your English Teacher Wouldn't Approve!:
I wish I had had this about forty years ago when I was a high-school student! Just kidding, but this strictly-for-fun little volume does not disappoint by cutting the chaff to get to the kernel at the heart of the matter.
