My answer to your question, Will, would be no, if for no other reason than my likewise lukewarm response to Gertrude and Claudius. It might have something more to do with the basic difficulty of fundamentally reimagining iconic works of fiction, though. I think my preference in "subversive" fiction is for works that approach their source text from a slightly more oblique angle: Cf. Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time, in reaction to Richard III, or the contrast between the early and late Peter Wimsey novels of Dorothy Sayers. Heck, for that matter, I suppose Don Quixote is a good example of what I mean. Any thoughts?

I'm not going to do another 50 Book Challenge this year, but I will mention that I just finished Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad, a re-telling of the story of the Odyssey from the point of view of Penelope and her maids (who turn out to have rather different views of the affairs). It was pretty good, although the hints of Atwood's trademark wit were a little too rare. The problem is that the basic premise has been done, and done better, in James Harrson's poem Penelope (available towards the bottom of this page).

Irony of ironies, I had the same lukewarm reaction to John Updike's Gertrude and Claudius (which retells Hamlet from Gertrude's point of view), which had been done better in a 2-page story by . . . Margaret Atwood.

Is my preference for the short and sweet a sign that I am getting old?