CONTRIBUTOR’S VIEW – Cathy Hunt: Summer Reading Made Easy?

Published 9:30 am Wednesday, May 28, 2025

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School’s out! Three local high school graduations are in the bag. Let the lazy days of summer begin!

However, if you’re a student in an advanced English class, you may have the shadow of some heavy-duty reading assignments hanging over you. If you’re super-organized and dedicated, you’ll make a schedule of pages that must be read each week, and you’ll take notes so you can remember. For the rest of you (99%), you’ll procrastinate until the last week or two of vacation and then panic. You’ll hibernate for a week to try to get most of the reading done, or you’ll access Cliff’s Notes, or you’ll throw up your hands in defeat – or some combination of those. And then the first-day-of-class test will be upon you.

This column is not for you though; you probably won’t be reading it anyway. It’s to entertain adults who might remember similar pressures and/or have read some of the classics.

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One of my favorite little books, given to me decades ago, is Shrinklits: 70 of the World’s Towering Classics Cut Down to Size, by Maurice Sagoff. It is an illustrated book of verses, some short, some long, which offer an apt but light-hearted take on classic works. An example of a short one: (The Raven) “Raven lurches in/ Perches over door./ Query- Where’s Lenore?/ Creepy bird/ Knows one word:/ Nevermore.”

I won’t include the entirety of one of Sagoff’s longer takes, but here are the first two lines of a couple more, which are fun in themselves: (Beowulf) “Monster Grendel’s tastes are plainish./ Breakfast? Just a couple Danish.” And (Moby Dick) “Whale chomped Ahab’s leg in two. ‘Hunt that beast!’ he tells his crew.”

Another popular book in the same vein is John Atkinson’s Abridged Classics: Brief Summaries of Books You Were Supposed to Read but Probably Didn’t. The author summarizes in one or two sentences. Two examples: (The Great Gatsby) “Rich, selfish people hang out. Something about the American dream” and (Pride and Prejudice) “Girl hates wealthy aristocrat. Wait, no she doesn’t.”

My husband messaged me a witty illustration which was published on the Unitarian Universalist Hysterical Society website. Among the abridged classics featured were these gems: (Walden) “Man sits outside for two years. Nothing happens.” (The Odyssey) “War vet takes forever to get home. Then he kills everyone.” (Crime and Punishment) “Murderer feels bad. Confesses. Goes to jail. Feels better.” (The Inferno) “All hell breaks loose.” (The Grapes of Wrath) “Farming sucks. Road trip! Road trip sucks.” (Ulysses) “Dublin, something, something, something, run-on sentence.”

I also found on RinkWorks.com their Book-a-Minute classics, which are humorous short “dialogues” by the characters in the book. Examples are (Gulliver’s Travels) A Lilliputian: “We’re small.” A Brobdingnagian: “We’re Big.” A Horse: “We can talk.”  Gulliver: “Now that I’m home from my travels, I hate people” and (A Christmas Carol) Scrooge: “Bah, humbug. You’ll work 38 hours on Christmas Day and like it.” Jacob Marley: “Three ghosts of Christmas will visit.” Ghosts: “You’re mean.” Scrooge: “I have seen the light. Let’s dance in the street. Have some money.”

If you’d like some Shakespeare, I must plug a hilarious little play I directed at Troup High many years ago — “The Fifteen-Minute Hamlet” by Tom Stoppard. You can probably see a version of it on YouTube.

Of course, it does help to have some knowledge of the original works to fully appreciate the cleverness of these succinct summaries. But if you enjoy these, please buy one of the books mentioned or visit the websites. (I do not receive a portion of the proceeds. I just like to support creative people!)

A final word to any students who may have read this far: Get that summer reading done without shortcuts. You may have a diabolical teacher such as myself who is a master at constructing tests that Cliff or Sparky will not help you pass!