The notion that the massive, meandering tome that is James Joyce’s Ulysses can be compressed to the Twitter format is an intriguing one. The New York branch of Penguin books has commissioned teenage Twitterers Emmett Rensin and Alex Aciman to do precisely that.

The word play should be fun, but you feel that new readers will miss quite a lot of protagonist Leopold Bloom’s scatalogical contemplation in the streets of Dublin, let alone the off-the-wall stream-of-consciousness of wife Molly at the end.

And it is hard to imagine that classics by Stendhal and Shakespeare will benefit from being rendered in 20 tweets or fewer.

But as I have never - shock, horror - managed to get through the entire 14,000 lines of Dante’s Divine Comedy, I may just have to take a look at that. Even if Rensin and Aciman will have scarcely enough tweets for the circles of hell.