Thaindian News

London, May 12 (ANI): Classic literary works by Charles Dickens, JD Sallinger and Jane Austen are now being shortened into 140-character “tweets”, as part of the latest diversion of the popular Twitter website.

Bookish readers of the micro-blogging site are now boiling down such great works into a single sentence, and what is coming out is a whole new trend of 140 word synopses of some of the most classic novels.

Although the brevity of the summaries could appeal to modern readers more, the trend of using Internet slang might just offend literary purists.

An example of the phenomenon could be given by how Samuel Beckett’s bleak play Waiting for Godot is reduced to: “Vladimir and Estragon stand next to tree and wait for Godot. Their status is not updated.”

The fuss surrounding the publication of DH Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960 is summed up with the web acronym for websites that are not suitable for work: “Upper-class woman gets it on with gamekeeper.”

Tim Collins, a writer who has collected some of his own summaries in a new book, said that though the compositions were meant to be tongue-in-cheek, the platform would open up new possibilities for art and education.

“It’s very easy to knock Twitter as something you use to tell the world what you ordered in Starbucks this morning, but it’s more than that,” the Telegraph quoted him as saying.

He added: “What it is really good for is live-blogging events as they take place, and that can work for historical events too. Over Easter a church in the US re-created the death and Resurrection of Christ through tweets”.

‘The Little Book of Twitter’ authored by Collins is published this week. (ANI)