The Digested Twenty-first Century
Read The Digested Twenty-first Century Online
Authors: John Crace
21
st
CENTURY
Also by John Crace
Vertigo: One Football Fan’s Fear of Success
Brideshead Abbreviated:
The Digested Read of the Twentieth Century
Baby Alarm: Thoughts from a Neurotic Father
Harry’s Games: Inside the Mind of Harry Redknapp
21
st
CENTURY
John Crace
CONSTABLE
·
LONDON
Constable & Robinson Ltd
55–56 Russell Square
London WC1B 4HP
First published in the UK by Constable
an imprint of Constable & Robinson, 2014
Copyright © John Crace 2014
All Digested Reads first published by the
Guardian
(
theguardian.com
)
© Guardian News & Media Ltd. and John Crace
The right of John Crace to be identified as the author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs & Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-78033-858-3 (hardback)
ISBN: 978-1-78033-908-5 (ebook)
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Printed and bound in the EU
Cover by Simon Levy and Nicola Jennings
For John Sutherland, superprof
The Laying on of Hands
– Alan Bennett
The Little Friend
– Donna Tartt
Notes on a Scandal
– Zoë Heller
Crossing the Lines
– Melvyn Bragg
Never Let Me Go
– Kazuo Ishiguro
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
– Jonathan Safran Foer
Memories of My Melancholy Whores
– Gabriel García Márquez
The Possibility of an Island
– Michel Houellebecq
No Country for Old Men
– Cormac McCarthy
Travels in the Scriptorium
– Paul Auster
Michael Tolliver Lives
– Armistead Maupin
Bright Shiny Morning
– James Frey
The Little Stranger
– Sarah Waters
The Original of Laura: A Novel in Fragments
– Vladimir Nabokov
So Much For That
– Lionel Shriver
Imperial Bedrooms
– Bret Easton Ellis
The Stranger’s Child
– Alan Hollinghurst
The Sense of an Ending
– Julian Barnes
The Marriage Plot
– Jeffrey Eugenides
Bring Up the Bodies
– Hilary Mantel
A Hologram for the King
– Dave Eggers
The Childhood of Jesus
– JM Coetzee
The Clematis Tree
– Ann Widdecombe
I Don’t Know How She Does It
– Allison Pearson
Handle with Care
– Jodi Picoult
Fifty Shades of Grey
– EL James
Peaches for Monsieur Le Curé
– Joanne Harris
In the Name of Love
– Katie Price
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy
– Helen Fielding
My Favourite Wife
– Tony Parsons
Round the Bend
– Jeremy Clarkson
Things My Mother Never Told Me
– Blake Morrison
A Round-Heeled Woman
– Jane Juska
Chronicles, Volume 1
– Bob Dylan
The Intimate Adventures of a London Call-Girl
– Belle de Jour
Don’t You Know Who I Am?
– Piers Morgan
Going Rogue: An American Life
– Sarah Palin
Mud, Sweat and Tears
– Bear Grylls
May I Have Your Attention, Please?
– James Corden
Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography, Volume 1
– Charles Moore
A Man in Love
– Karl Ove Knausgård
Girl Least Likely To
– Liz Jones
An Appetite for Wonder
– Richard Dawkins
Ever, Dirk: The Bogarde Letters
The Pursuit of Laughter: Essays, Articles, Reviews & Diary
– Diana Mosley
God Bless America
– Piers Morgan
Letters to Monica
– Philip Larkin
PG Wodehouse: A Life in Letters
Public Enemies
–
Michel Houellebecq and Bernard Henri-Levy
Liberation, Volume 3: Diaries: 1970-1983
–
Christopher Isherwood
Counting One’s Blessings: The Selected Letters of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother
The Letters of TS Eliot Volume 4:1928–1929
Distant Intimacy
– Frederic Raphael and Joseph Epstein
Here and Now: Letters 2008–2011
–
Paul Auster and JM Coetzee
Buildings: Letters 1960–1975
– Isaiah Berlin
The Privilege of Youth
– Dave Pelzer
Freakonomics
– Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
The Architecture of Happiness
– Alain de Botton
Small Dogs Can Save Your Life
– Bel Mooney
I Can Make You Happy
– Paul McKenna
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
– Amy Chua
How to be a Woman
– Caitlin Moran
French Children Don’t Throw Food
– Pamela Druckerman
Antifragile
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Manuscript Found in Accra
– Paulo Coelho
David and Goliath
– Malcolm Gladwell
Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World
–
Niall Ferguson
A Briefer History of Time
– Stephen Hawking
God is Not Great
– Christopher Hitchens
The Case for God
– Karen Armstrong
Religion for Atheists
– Alain de Botton
State of Fear
– Michael Crichton
Hannibal Rising
– Thomas Harris
Beneath the Bleeding
– Val McDermid
The Troubled Man
– Henning Mankell
A Delicate Truth
– John le Carré
The Cuckoo’s Calling
– Robert Galbraith
A Cook’s Tour
– Anthony Bourdain
Gordon Ramsay Makes it Easy
– Gordon Ramsay
Breakfast at the Wolseley
– AA Gill
Nigella’s Christmas
– Nigella Lawson
Noma: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine
– René Redzepi
Notes From My Kitchen Table
– Gwyneth Paltrow
Gardening at Longmeadow
– Monty Don
Stephen Fry in America
– Stephen Fry
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
– JK Rowling
Between the start of the twentieth century and the beginning of the First World War, L Frank Baum wrote
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
, Colette wrote
Claudine in Paris
, Joseph Conrad wrote
Heart of Darkness
, Baronness Orczy wrote
The Scarlet Pimpernel
, EM Forster wrote
Howards End
, Thomas Mann wrote
Death in Venice
and Marcel Proust wrote
Swann’s Way
. All these books have entered the literary canon and are still read today.
The Digested Read started life in early 2000 and has been running continuously in the
Guardian
ever since. Its premise is quite simple: to take the book that has been receiving the most media attention in any given week and rewrite it in about 700 words, retelling the story in the style of the author. However the emphasis is often on those aspects of the book that the author might prefer to have gone unnoticed: the clunky plot devices, fairytale psychology, poor dialogue, stylistic tics, unedited longueurs and the emperor’s new clothes.
Is the Digested Read parody, pastiche or satire? The distinctions frequently are blurred. It can be all three, depending on the book in question; but it is always meant to be entertaining, funny and informative. Literary reviewing has become more critically objective since I began writing the Digested Read, thanks mainly to the growth of literary blogs and below-the-line conversations on newspaper websites. But it is still relatively cosy compared to theatre, film and music reviewing.
The literary world is quite small: many reviewers are also authors. That can blur the critical boundaries; sometimes towards a hatchet job as old enemies settle scores, but mostly towards reviews that are rather more anodyne and favourable than they might otherwise have been. Who wants to make too many waves, when it might be your book being reviewed next? Some writers also seem to be given an inexplicably easier ride than others; almost as if the literary world has collectively decided that some authors are beyond adverse criticism.
