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"Sparky Sweets' self-styled "gangster" approach to education is bringing books like Jane Eyre and To Kill a Mockingbird to new audiences. Miranda Dobson meets him For those students who hastily scan SparkNotes, Wikipedia or CliffNotes before a seminar, the latest comedy sensation to hit YouTube could be a godsend. Sparky Sweets PhD invites his viewers to join him as he gives the lowdown on the great and the good of literature, urging his Twitter followers to, "Educate yo'self, son", by using his Thug Notes. Hailing from the streets of L.A. and claiming to have a doctorate in Classics, Dr Sweets delivers literary summaries and analysis in his "original gangster" style, in a way that he hopes will both entertain book nerds and educate/enlighten those who aren't into their literature. With an unprecedented surge of YouTube fans, Sparky has over 99,000 subscribers to his channel, and counting, and nearly 506,000 views on his most popular "drop" on classic American novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. Also included on Sparky's reading list are George Orwell's 1984, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, and popular culture's latest literary buzz courtesy of Baz Luhrmann's film, The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Sparky tells me the idea for Thug Notes came about as a result of his "frustration with the world of academia." "In my opinion," he says, "an academic's job should be to utilise their passion for the classics to make the gift of literature available to everyone. Unfortunately, in my experiences, that is not the case." Sparky believes academia is "enshrouded by a veil of unnecessarily convoluted terminology and intellectual one-upmanship", which negates the whole point of education. "Instead of promoting the universality of these works, they are building them up to a virtually inaccessible plane and saying 'If you want to truly understand classical literature, you have to get on my level.' So Thug Notes is my way of tri

Il video che illustra l'articolo è quello delle Thug Notes per Hamlet.