The Digested Twenty-first Century
On sale
10th April 2014
Price: £12.99
Genre
John Crace’s Digested Read first appeared in in February 2000 and has been running ever since. Each week Crace reduces a new book – anything from a Booker Prize winner to a Nigella cookery book is fair game – to 700 words in a parody of the plot, style, dialogue and themes. Or lack of them. The Digested Read has not just become an institution for readers; it is read and enjoyed by publishers and authors too. So long as it is not their book being digested. A few years ago Crace wrote Brideshead Abbreviated, A Digested Read of the 20th Century. This is the 21st Century. So far.
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Reviews
I've read all these books at least twice - and now I've read John Crace's digested versions I wonder why I bothered.
For the last 10 years [Crace's] 'Digested Reads' have been reason enough to buy the Guardian. Taking a well-known novel, he gives a brief distillation of the plot while capturing - often perfectly - the tone of its author. At the same time, he jabs a sharpened elbow into their pomposities and limitations.
A swift kick up the backside to some of modern literature's most iconic works. Accurate, merciless and very, very funny.