The made for tv movie is on YouTube. It starred Diana Rigg. I have a bizarre fascination with nuns and their spiritual life.
Have you read Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy? Also by Godden.
I’ve read it several times.
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.
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.
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.
You mean The Princess Bride?
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.
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.
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.)
Bet a nickel it was “Up The Down Staircase,” I read the RDC version too.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!).
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.
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.