LET HE WHO HAS ACTUALLY READ ULYSSES THROW THE FIRST STONE :

Book-Club Smarts in a Nutshell: Get Notes (KATE ZERNIKE, 6/19/02, NY Times)

"Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" was a blockbuster book, spawning blockbuster sequels and a blockbuster movie. Next month, it will achieve that mark of a true classic: the publishers of SparkNotes, a CliffsNotes knockoff, will publish a study guide--also known as a cheat sheet--to the tale of the little boy with the lightning-bolt scar.

Moving far beyond "Macbeth" and "The Mayor of Casterbridge," Cliffs and a new generation of competitors are now racing to be the first to publish notes to contemporary titles like "All the Pretty Horses," "Snow Falling on Cedars," "Angela's Ashes" and "Cold Mountain."

The new selections reflect a change in the kind of books being taught in high school and college literature classes. But they also reveal a new kind of Cliffs user. The guides are now being produced for people who want to brush up before their book club, keep up in conversations with colleagues or at cocktail parties, or read the book--at least, some version of it--before they see the movie.

Like bleary-eyed students, some new readers are using the books as a supplement; others, as a substitute. [...]

The purists warn of missing out.

"The beauty of reading is coming away from it with an interpretation that you own," said Diane Waryold, executive director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University. "When you're getting that through CliffsNotes or SparkNotes or whatever, you're not really taking the book and reflecting on it, and really reading it for what the author intended it to be read for."

Hard to see anything wrong with using such guides to steer you through a text you're finding difficult. I've found Spark Notes to be a big help even just in terms of getting the context of when an author wrote or what he was trying to do. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 19, 2002 9:07 AM