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‘How to Become Ridiculously Well-Read in One Evening’ — Seriously
Were you too drunk or stoned to read all the books assigned in school? Catch up painlessly with witty summaries of 150 classics.
Were you playing hooky the day your eighth-grade teacher taught that lesson on The Old Man and the Sea? Sleeping off a hangover when your English Lit prof explained Othello?
Track down a copy of How to Become Ridiculously Well-Read in One Evening. In this humor collection edited by E.O. Parrott, 31 critics or other experts wittily send up 150 classic novels, plays and poems.
Tim Hopkins channels Othello in 10 tabloid-headline parodies that include GIRL WITH EVERYTHING ASKS FOR MOOR. Basil Ransome-Davies shows how an overeager publicist might have promoted The Bostonians: “He’s done it again! Our guess is that’s what you’ll be saying to yourself when you read Henry James’s latest exposé of upper-crust Boston …” V. Ernest Cox tweaks Animal Farm with metrical inspiration from the Civil War song “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again”: “The animals stage a coup d’état, / Hurrah! Hurrah! /And from the farm all humans bar, / Hurrah! Hurrah!”
Most of the contributors turn the classics into verse. Cox playfully sums up The Old Man and the Sea in a…
