Not Quite Cliffs Notes

This is not a new book (copyright 2000), but I just came across it: The 5-Minute Iliad and Other Instant Classics: Great Books for the Short Attention Span. It provides a fun little take on a number of pieces of classic literature. I’ll have to read it to refresh myself about those I’ve already read and familiarize myself with those I haven’t.

Moby-Dick is condensed to 10 pages. I think it might have been especially useful to have had this as an alternative for those who got stuck on the “Cetology” chapter. In this version it—along with a few other chapters, I believe—reads thus:

The whale is a gigantic sea creature with a big head at one end and a great thick tail at the other. It is therefore a fish. Like us, the whale has warm blood and lungs; unlike most of us, the whale swims about in the watery depths of the ocean and breathes through the top of its head. There are different kinds of whales in different parts of the world. The most commonly hunted are the Right Whale of the North Atlantic and the Norway Right Whale. There are also Nearly Right Whales, Technically Right Whales, Slightly Erroneous Whales, Simply Wrong Whales, and a thousand other varieties besides. They have lots of blubber, which can be made into oil, and also ivory, and meat, and some of them, ambergris. Ambergris is used as a skin lotion by many islanders of the South Seas, as an aphrodisiac by many Asian, as jewelry by some Australian aborigines, and an excellent plaque-fighting toothpaste in the Americas.