# Reading an uncondensed book **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Tags:** books-writing-myths\ **Created:** [June 2, 2023, 11:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-an-uncondensed-book/984937 "2023-06-02T23:32:57Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![peedin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/peedin/32/14095_2.png) [@peedin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/peedin)\ **Post date:** [June 3, 2023, 10:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-an-uncondensed-book/984937/21 "2023-06-03T22:05:40Z")
> [@SmartAleq](#): > > > [@peedin](#): > > > > I thought I was the only person who read _In This House of Brede_ > > 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! The made for tv movie is on YouTube. It starred Diana Rigg. I have a bizarre fascination with nuns and their spiritual life. ---
**Author:** ![Baker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/bb73d2/32.png) [@Baker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Baker)\ **Post date:** [June 3, 2023, 10:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-an-uncondensed-book/984937/22 "2023-06-03T22:38:04Z")
Have you read _Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy_? Also by Godden. ---
**Author:** ![Ulfreida](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ulfreida/32/8014_2.png) [@Ulfreida](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ulfreida)\ **Post date:** [June 3, 2023, 10:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-an-uncondensed-book/984937/23 "2023-06-03T22:45:55Z")
> [@Thudlow\_Boink](#): > > > [@peedin](#): > > > > I thought I was the only person who read _In This House of Brede_ > > I’ve read it too! I’ve read it several times. ---
**Author:** ![Ulfreida](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ulfreida/32/8014_2.png) [@Ulfreida](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ulfreida)\ **Post date:** [June 3, 2023, 10:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-an-uncondensed-book/984937/24 "2023-06-03T22:49:58Z")
> [@Kropotkin](#): > > Cheaper by the Dozen, however, got me interested in the labour process and I wrote about Frank and Lillian Gilbreth in my MA thesis. When we built our house we designed the kitchen using a book called The Motion Minded Kitchen by Sam Clark, who was inspired by the Gilbreths’ design work. It was a good kitchen. My fifth grade teacher, Mr.Radlo, read us Cheaper By the Dozen, laughing uproariously at all the funny parts. ---
**Author:** ![Pardel-Lux](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pardel-lux/32/20182_2.png) [@Pardel-Lux](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pardel-Lux)\ **Post date:** [June 3, 2023, 10:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-an-uncondensed-book/984937/25 "2023-06-03T22:50:50Z")
When I grew up in Spain there was (I think there still is) a publishing house called Editorial Bruguera that abridged all sorts of books for children: Karl May, Emile Salgari, Jules Verne, Robinson Crusoe, Pirate Island… they must have published hundreds! They abridged them twice, actually! In the abridged books themselves they inserted comic versions of the book in question, one page drawings out of every four or six of text, that condensed the plot even more. I read a lot of them and enjoyed them a lot, ignorant me. Many years later, when I decided to learn French, I thought that reading books I knew was a good start, so I bought a lot of cheap editions of Jules Verne (and Harry Potter, hum.). I was amazed how much better those books were than what I remembered. I wish I had read the real books instead of the children’s version. Now reading this thread I wonder whether the Editorial Bruguera stole the idea of abridging books from Reader’s Digest. Now, wiser – I hope – I believe abridging books is a bad publishing policy, be it for children or adults. It is a travesty. It is condescending. Though it may be good business. Except, of course, _The Princess Bride_. That is a book well abridged. But that is a different kettle of gothy. ---
**Author:** ![Ulfreida](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ulfreida/32/8014_2.png) [@Ulfreida](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ulfreida)\ **Post date:** [June 3, 2023, 10:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-an-uncondensed-book/984937/26 "2023-06-03T22:53:15Z")
> [@solost](#): > > I was reading Dostoyevsky for fun in my teens. Frankly I think that’s the best time to read him. Into the mid-twenties anyway. I related easily to his characters’ bent for intense emotional exaggeration at that time. ---
**Author:** ![Ulfreida](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ulfreida/32/8014_2.png) [@Ulfreida](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ulfreida)\ **Post date:** [June 3, 2023, 10:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-an-uncondensed-book/984937/27 "2023-06-03T22:54:04Z")
You mean The Princess Bride? ---
**Author:** ![Pardel-Lux](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pardel-lux/32/20182_2.png) [@Pardel-Lux](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pardel-Lux)\ **Post date:** [June 3, 2023, 10:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-an-uncondensed-book/984937/28 "2023-06-03T22:54:49Z")
Yes, I do. I’ll correct it, if there is still time. ETA: There was! And I agree with your asessment of the right time to read Dostoyevsky too. ---
**Author:** ![hogarth](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hogarth/32/1773_2.png) [@hogarth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hogarth)\ **Post date:** [June 3, 2023, 11:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-an-uncondensed-book/984937/29 "2023-06-03T23:43:59Z")
I remember reading the whitewashing the fence section of **Tom Sawyer** in some collection of stories for children. I didn’t read the whole book until I was an adult; the fence painting was probably the best part anyways. ---
**Author:** ![thorny\_locust](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thorny_locust/32/431_2.png) [@thorny\_locust](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thorny_locust)\ **Post date:** [June 4, 2023, 2:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-an-uncondensed-book/984937/30 "2023-06-04T02:44:28Z")
> [@Thudlow\_Boink](#): > > > [@solost](#): > > > > I never trusted condensed books. Who chooses what gets left in and what is unimportant enough to take out? And who are they to decide? > > 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. The school I went to in my early teens had some Reader’s Digest condensed books in the library. So I read some of them. One of them was a book about a new teacher’s first year in a fairly rough school – I’m now trying to think of the name, and can’t. (It must have come out in the early 1960’s or late 1950’s.) After reading the condensed version, I came across the full length version, and read that. And I realized they’d condensed it by leaving in the parts that were heartwarming and/or funny, and taking out the parts that were serious criticisms of the school system and the situations in and out of school that some of the children were growing up in. I stopped reading condensed versions. (If I ever read _In This House of Brede_, I’ve forgotten it entirely. Which is quite possible; I’m nearly always reading something, and not all of it sticks.) ---
**Author:** ![SmartAleq](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/smartaleq/32/163_2.png) [@SmartAleq](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SmartAleq)\ **Post date:** [June 4, 2023, 2:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-an-uncondensed-book/984937/31 "2023-06-04T02:58:33Z")
> [@thorny\_locust](#): > > One of them was a book about a new teacher’s first year in a fairly rough school – I’m now trying to think of the name, and can’t. (It must have come out in the early 1960’s or late 1950’s.) After reading the condensed version, I came across the full length version, and read that. Bet a nickel it was “Up The Down Staircase,” I read the RDC version too. ---
**Author:** ![thorny\_locust](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thorny_locust/32/431_2.png) [@thorny\_locust](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thorny_locust)\ **Post date:** [June 4, 2023, 3:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-an-uncondensed-book/984937/32 "2023-06-04T03:00:59Z")
Thank you! Having thought of it for the first time in years, it was seriously bugging me that I couldn’t remember the name or author. And yes, that was definitely it. ---
**Author:** ![gkster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gkster/32/14107_2.png) [@gkster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gkster)\ **Post date:** [June 4, 2023, 5:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-an-uncondensed-book/984937/33 "2023-06-04T05:36:31Z")
I’ve been reading the RDCs since I was 8 or 9, in the magazine and the bound editions as well. There was a time during the 70s that they would feature Soviet spy books in the magazine several times a year, which got boring. There’s just one book that I can think of that I read condensed first and full-length later, and where I thought condensed was better: James Michener’s “From the Farm of Bitterness” section of _Hawaii_. The book had fascinating characters and incidents but on the whole was too bloated. And not long ago I read the full-length version of John Ball’s _Miss One Thousand Spring Blossoms_, which I had liked a lot and re-read a few times as a teen. It was interesting to look at scenes and details in the full-length version, but I thought that the condensed version, while blander, had done a good job of capturing the essence of the book. @thorny_locust I read Up the Down Staircase in RDC and hadn’t thought about it in years either! And I’ve been a Rumer Godden fan since I was 12 and read her memoir _Two Under the Indian Sun_, so @peedin and @Dendarii_Dame count me in with the fans and re-readers of _In this House of Brede_. In fact, after I read _Brede_ and _China Court_ in 1991, I wrote a fan letter to Godden, and she wrote back, a real letter that showed that she’d read mine, not just a form letter. I didn’t know there was a condensed version of _Brede_, maybe I should look it up. Many of the RDCs are available here, on [Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free & Borrowable Books, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine](https://archive.org/search?query=%22reader%27s+digest+condensed+books%22) ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [June 4, 2023, 6:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-an-uncondensed-book/984937/34 "2023-06-04T06:50:21Z")
I had an abridged version of _A Pilgrim’s Progress_ that resulted in me buying the real thing. I did read the first book, but man it was a lot drier than the abridged version. ---
**Author:** ![Asuka](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/dec6dc/32.png) [@Asuka](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Asuka)\ **Post date:** [June 4, 2023, 9:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-an-uncondensed-book/984937/35 "2023-06-04T09:18:48Z")
One of my father’s favorite books ever was James Clavell’s King Rat ever since he got a copy of the book while serving in the Army right around the time the book was originally released. I think it might have been some abridged travel version because when he later got a copy of the full Clavell Asian Saga with a hardcover King Rat he read it again and said there was a bunch of stuff he didn’t remember in the original book, mainly a bunch of flashbacks to the wives/girlfriends of the POWs which he claimed were entirely unnecessary and dragged down the book. I always wondered if the original book didn’t have those sequences and the revision did, or if he was given a shorter abridged copy that was made for soldiers on the move. ---
**Author:** ![solost](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/solost/32/11776_2.png) [@solost](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/solost)\ **Post date:** [June 4, 2023, 12:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-an-uncondensed-book/984937/36 "2023-06-04T12:46:06Z")
> [@Ulfreida](#): > > > [@solost](#): > > > > I was reading Dostoyevsky for fun in my teens. > > Frankly I think that’s the best time to read him. Into the mid-twenties anyway. I related easily to his characters’ bent for intense emotional exaggeration at that time. That may be true. I read and loved _Crime and Punishment_ and _The Brothers Karamazov_ when I was younger. Then in my early to mid 30s I attempted _The Idiot_ and felt like an idiot myself because I could not get through it. Not sure if my brain changed, or if I just had less free time and more responsibilities in my life distracting me by that age. ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [June 4, 2023, 1:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-an-uncondensed-book/984937/37 "2023-06-04T13:35:02Z")
There’s always the possibility that the translation was at least partly to blame (assuming you don’t read Russian). That said, I too read and liked _Crime & Punishment_ and _The Brothers Karamazov_ (which are generally regarded as his best works), but there was one other that I half-heartedly tried but couldn’t get into—don’t remember whether it was _The Idiot_ or _Notes from Underground_. ---
**Author:** ![carrps](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carrps/32/2957_2.png) [@carrps](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carrps)\ **Post date:** [June 4, 2023, 3:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-an-uncondensed-book/984937/38 "2023-06-04T15:43:23Z")
> [@SmartAleq](#): > > Bet a nickel it was “Up The Down Staircase,” I read the RDC version too. That was going to my guess, too. It was a good book (I read the unabridged version), and it was a good movie, as well, with Sandy Dennis (I almost said Sandy Duncan – ack!). ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2023, 1:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-an-uncondensed-book/984937/39 "2023-06-05T13:22:38Z")
> [@Baker](#): > > 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. My mother used to have a large collection of Reader’s Digest Condensed books. I read _The Flight of the Phoenix_ and one other as condensed books – mainly because I couldn’t find the “uncondensed” versions. But when I saw _Kon-Tiki_ there, I figured I wanted to read the entire, uncondensed book. I asked for it as a birthday present, and loved it. Never went back to the condensed ones again. My mother long ago gave them all away. I don’t know why she bothered with them – she was a voracious reader, and could easily go through the uncondensed versions in no time. ---
**Author:** ![Railer13](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/railer13/32/9742_2.png) [@Railer13](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Railer13)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2023, 1:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-an-uncondensed-book/984937/40 "2023-06-05T13:31:10Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#): > > I don’t know why she bothered with them – she was a voracious reader, and could easily go through the uncondensed versions in no time. My parents had probably 15-20 of these volumes, and I read each and every story when I was a kid. I think my folks bought them because they were (supposedly) a good deal. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-an-uncondensed-book/984937.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-an-uncondensed-book/984937.md?page=3)