A giggle for "serious" readers

[MsAmerica]

By "serious," I mean the kind of person who's happy to settle down with a 700-page Victorian novel This article is about the Blinkist condensation app.

Can You Read a Book in a Quarter of an Hour?
Phone apps now offer to boil down entire books into micro-synopses. What they leave out is revealing.
The New Yorker
By Anthony Lane

Jump from St. Petersburg to Regency England, and you will see Blinkist caving completely to this urge. Among the pleasures that I have derived from the app, few are more satisfying than the realization that Jane Austen, of all people, can be distilled into a babbling stream of consciousness.

Darcy’s feelings for Lizzie have turned unequivocally romantic One afternoon, Darcy bursts in on her and bluntly proposes You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you, he says Lizzie is shocked and rejects him harshly, telling him, I have never desired your good opinion and you have certainly bestowed it most unwillingly

What is prompted by this unusual passage, if not the delightful sensation that “Pride and Prejudice” is in the midst of being rewritten by Lydia Bennet? The near-total lack of punctuation would cause Henderson, the edit king of Reader’s Digest, to have a fit of the vapors, and, should it emerge that artificial intelligence is responsible for the lapse, we would be right to fret. If this is how A.I. handles proofreading, just think how it would screw up the release of a nuclear warhead.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/05/27/can-you-read-a-book-in-a-quarter-of-an-hour

Fabulous, thank you. Portrait of the Artist definitely made me laugh too loudly. I think Blinkist could learn a thing or too from Shrinklits - do you remember those? My all-time favourite, not from the original book but an Australian newspaper competition, was:

Just six little Aussies
Where once there were seven.
A eucalypt felled one,
And now she’s
In Heaven.

Very funny! Shrinklits doesn't ring a bell - I wonder if they'd seem familiar if I ran across them.

It reminded me, though, long ago, New York magazine had a weekly contest run by Mary Ann Madden, always different but always clever, such as inviting submissions of famous works summarized in a limerick.

This article, for me, alternated between hilarious and horrifying.