I used to have some Reader’s Digest books. Three books I like well enough that I searched out the uncondensed versions. One was a novel, In This House of Brede and the other two were about two natural disasters. One was The Day the World Ended, about the 1902 eruption of Mt Pelee on the island of Martinique. The other was The San Francisco Earthquake, about the 1906 quake in California.
Have you ever read condensed books, or clips from books, that got you to read the whole thing? Or maybe when you were a kid you read the juvenile version of an adult book and you read the “grownup” version. Which reminds me, when I read the original adult version of Gulliver’s Travels I was surprised at the “dirty” episodes.
Yes, once in particular. Lone Woman, the biography of Elizabeth Blackwell, first female doctor in the US. I suggested it for our book club. A bit on the dry side with a lot of details. In retrospect, the condensed version was probably a better read.
Also a thriller, might have been named Bait, about a police detective who participates in luring in a male serial killer. Been awhile on that one.
It is not necessarily the best method, but sometimes I have flipped through a novel or anthology to see if it looked good, also in cases when the clip or excerpt caught my eye. I have never deliberately sought out a “condensed” version, however; the synopsis on Wikipedia is usually plenty condensed enough.
My grandmother had them when I was a kid, and I used them to find out what books I might want to pick up at the library. This is how I got interested in the Mrs. Polifax series.
When I was perhaps 10 years old, I read the RD condensed version of Rascal by Sterling North, the story of a boy who adopts a baby raccoon kit and raises it as a pet. I was enthralled by the story and was thrilled when I received the full version as a Christmas present. As I recall, the two versions weren’t that much different, but that didn’t stop me from reading the full version multiple times.
You would not believe how many copies of that come into the library where I work. (or maybe you would?) Naturally, it was, and still is, highly controversial. One of my local TV stations carries a weekly half-hour program called “Know Your Bible”, where three pastors answer questions asked by viewers, and someone asked about this a few weeks ago; since none of them appeared to have ever heard of the RDCB, I e-mailed them and told them about it. Haven’t received a response, which surprised me a bit because I have in the past, but maybe they got a lot of other similar responses.
I have read “Junior Reader’s Editions” of several best-selling nonfiction books, and one, “Three Cups of Tea”, that did turn out to be semi-fiction. I read the junior version of “Hidden Figures” (haven’t pursued the “adult” version yet) and when I found the intricate details of the boat’s construction in the book “Boys in the Boat” considerably less interesting than the author did, I tried the junior version, and couldn’t get through that either.
I checked out an abridged audiobook, The Count of Monte Cristo. I thought it too condensed and wanted more detail especially on Dante’s time in Chateau d’If.
So I switched to the unabridged version, and mon Dieu, this book has so many plots and sub plots I can barely keep up. I’m at ch 44 and I’m not half way through.
Nope, I read it too! And there was a movie too, as I recall.
My parents had a metric buttload of the RDC books and I read most of them–later on I did read some of the unexpurgated ones and discovered that one thing that always got chopped was ANY mention of s-e-x lol. I’m sure y’all are shocked by that!
I assume Reader’s Digest had (has? do they still publish them?) people whose job it was to condense books, but I don’t know what criteria they used.
Still, I imagine it’s not uncommon for the average reader to think they can condense a book—for example, all the people who read Lord of the Rings and think things like “Why didn’t he just leave out the Tom Bombadil part?” (Speaking of which, condensing a book must have a little in common with adapting a book to another medium, like film.)
I was still in my early teens when I did read Gulliver’s Travels. There were two scenes that opened my young eyes. The first was how Gulliver put out the fire in the Lilliputian palace, by peeing on it. And the other was how the ladies in Brobdinag(sp?) played with Gulliver, letting him sit astride their nipples. They don’t put those scenes in the movies.
I read it, and still don’t know who Les was.
I’ll see myself out.
In the 1960s, I read versions of RD condensed books from the 1940s that were more like a chapter or two, such as Grapes of Wrath, which was the chapter with the Okies trying to buy bread at the diner. It spurred me to read the whole book at a tender age.
Also read Li’l Britches,but was never inspired to read more. Cheaper by the Dozen, however, got me interested in the labour process and I wrote about Frank and Lillian Gilbreth in my MA thesis.
Growing up, we had the Reader’s Digest Best Loved Books for Young Readers series. It was about twelve volumes with about four condensed books in each, mostly novels but some biography and maybe poetry. I think I read almost all of them at least once. I have since read several of them in the original unabridged form, but not most. Oliver Twist, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Kidnapped, The Red Badge of Courage, and The Call of the Wild are some that come to mind. It was so long ago when I read the condensed versions that I don’t remember how they differ from the originals.
Diana Rigg was in the movie, but I haven’t seen it or read the book. I didn’t know it was Rumer Godden. I read her children’s books as a kid and loved them, but I only know her adult work from the movies made from them. Think I’ll check out Brede since so many people seem to have liked it.
I read the whole thing myself and really enjoyed it. I also thought that whoever did the condensed version did a pretty good job, you still got the feel of the original. Did you ever see the movie version of To Kill a Mockingbird It was kind of like that, the movie really did a good job of condensing the book.
