I recently bought the audio book of War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy from Audible.com. After listening to a couple hours I realized that I was completely lost. I went to Barnes and Noble looking for CliffsNotes on the book and found instead SparkNotes. I can’t say if one is better than the other, but I can say that I love SparkNotes.

SparkNotes gives you information about the author, the important characters, the plot, the symbols and themes, and a lot more. A lot of information in a very compact format.

You can purchase SparkNotes for about $5 at Barnes and Noble. You can also purchase them in .pdf format and audio format for your iPod from the SparkNotes website, but the coolest thing is that you can actually read the entire SparkNotes for a given work online. I recently began reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, and when I wanted to confirm my suspicions about where the book was going to take me I just looked it up on the SparkNotes website. Very convenient indeed.

On a final note, I do not condone using any kind of notes in place of reading the actual piece of literature in question. If you find yourself doing this, drop out of school now and save yourself and your parents a lot of heartache.