# reading the REAL book **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [April 3, 2009, 6:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-the-real-book/491817 "2009-04-03T06:12:06Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Eyebrows\_0f\_Doom](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eyebrows_0f_doom/32/3119_2.png) [@Eyebrows\_0f\_Doom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Eyebrows_0f_Doom)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2009, 5:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-the-real-book/491817/41 "2009-04-05T05:36:45Z")
> [@Helena](#): > > I read _Les Misérables_ (I thought) while I was in junior high. It never dawned on me that it could be abridged, I mean, it was around 700-800 pages. Heh, one would think so, except the unabridged version is around 1400 pages! ---
**Author:** ![mbh](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/a6a055/32.png) [@mbh](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mbh)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2009, 5:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-the-real-book/491817/42 "2009-04-05T17:05:57Z")
When I was in grade school, I read a “children’s version” of _Moby Dick_. Not only did they cut out a whole lot of stuff, but they used the ending from the Gregory Peck movie. ---
**Author:** ![Zsofia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/7bcc69/32.png) [@Zsofia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zsofia)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2009, 6:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-the-real-book/491817/43 "2009-04-05T18:23:06Z")
> [@Miss\_Woodhouse](#): > > I’ve actually be opposed to my children reading “young reader” editions of the classics. They read well above their grade levels, i figured they could read the real thing when they were ready for it rather than the bastardized version. I’ve seen kids think they’ve read a book when all they read was some publishing house rewrite and I was afraid of my kids doing the same thing. > > It seems I’ve been doing them a disservice. I’ll be relaxing on that now. Nah, stick with it. I saw an _atrocious_ abridged _Wind in the Willows_ once - essentially it wasn’t any shorter, it was just less lovely. Stupid, stupid, stupid. And it was the only version I could find at the time. A real shame. ---
**Author:** ![Catamount](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/catamount/32/2840_2.png) [@Catamount](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Catamount)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2009, 10:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-the-real-book/491817/44 "2009-04-05T22:58:31Z")
> [@bup](#): > > Yeah, it’s hard to find an unabridged _Les Mis_. Well, maybe hard it overstating it, but most editions are abridged (without the fascinating history of Paris’ sewer system). Oh I found one no problem. My tenth grade English class was assigned this book as summer reading. It took me two and a half months to read the damn thing. As far as I was concerned, it could have ended after Fantine died, but no, it had to slog on for another two thousand pages. Then I get to class and find out everyone else had read the abridged version. I felt that I should have gotten a higher grade because I had read the whole thing, but I didn’t. The sewer system trip was actually the most interesting part of the last half of the book. At least Marius and Cosette weren’t simpering at each other then. ---
**Author:** ![Baker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/bb73d2/32.png) [@Baker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Baker)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2009, 2:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-the-real-book/491817/45 "2009-04-06T02:00:43Z")
> [@DrFidelius](#): > > **Gulliver’s Travels** > I’m just saying, a lot more middle-school boys would be reading it if they didn’t cut out the scenes with the Brodingnabian ladies-in-waiting. Ah, I’ll bet you’re talking about the part where Gulliver is naked, sitting astride their nipples! But what about the part about how he put out the palace fire in Lilliput? ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2009, 2:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-the-real-book/491817/46 "2009-04-06T02:19:30Z")
> [@](#): > > I’m confused – The Book of Merlin was first published posthuimosly by University of Texas Press, long after his 1964 death. My copy of The Once and Future King (also from long after his death) still has the transformations. > The Wikipedia page only notes the differences between the version in the tetralogy, not a third version: > > [The Sword in the Stone - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sword_in_the_Stone) It seems that we’re both confused, then… Is it possible that someone else edited the _Book of Merlin_ material in posthumously? If so, it would make that version less “authentic”, but nonetheless much better than the standalone _Book of Merlin_, which I though should have been titled “Arthur and T. H. White go senile”. ---
**Author:** ![Malleus\_Incus\_Stapes](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/malleus_incus_stapes/32/3293_2.png) [@Malleus\_Incus\_Stapes](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malleus_Incus_Stapes)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2009, 1:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-the-real-book/491817/47 "2009-04-06T13:54:26Z")
> [@Le\_Ministre\_de\_l\_au-dela](#): > > And for the opposite effect, I once walked to every bookstore between Eglinton Avenue and Queen Street along Yonge Street, (about 7 km) looking for a copy of the novel “The Princess Bride” that didn’t say ‘Abridged by William Goldman’. F#$k that, I thought, I want to read the whole thing. > > Finally, I thought to ask in Bakka why all the copies I had found were abridged. The salesman was very helpful after he stopped laughing at me… I, too, was frantically checking for an unabridged copy. Fortunately, I was doing this online, so I didn’t embarrass myself too much. ---
**Author:** ![Bridget\_Burke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7cd45c/32.png) [@Bridget\_Burke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bridget_Burke)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2009, 2:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-the-real-book/491817/48 "2009-04-06T14:02:15Z")
> [@Jester](#): > > Part of me wishes I were a high school English teacher these days, simply because of how much fun it would be to teach _Beowulf_ to a bunch of kids who had the recent movie readily accessible. I imagine it’s made spotting the kids who hadn’t actually done the readings just a little bit easier. During the American Lit section, of course you’ll teach [The Scarlet Letter](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scarlet_Letter_(1995_film)). ---
**Author:** ![Beware\_of\_Doug](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/278dde/32.png) [@Beware\_of\_Doug](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Beware_of_Doug)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2009, 2:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-the-real-book/491817/49 "2009-04-06T14:08:11Z")
I had an _illustrated_ edition of _Huck Finn_ in junior high (this would have been 1980). I don’t recall if it was expurgated or not, but the word _nigger_ sure got repeated a lot. ---
**Author:** ![Annie-Xmas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ecc23a/32.png) [@Annie-Xmas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Annie-Xmas)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2009, 2:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-the-real-book/491817/50 "2009-04-06T14:11:20Z")
In Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” the factory workers were orginally African pygmies who looked like they were made out of chocolate. They later became white skinned, golden haired people from “Oompaland.” PC run amok. ---
**Author:** ![Sigmagirl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c89c15/32.png) [@Sigmagirl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sigmagirl)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2009, 2:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-the-real-book/491817/51 "2009-04-06T14:19:58Z")
> [@RachelChristine](#): > > For me and my best friend it was Little Women. > > Somehow I had two copies, and had read it from both. I don’t remember when I realized that one was different from the other, but it was just a slightly condensed version. Lots of small things were left out of one. > > My best friend and I were talking one day, as older teenagers, maybe even college age, and I said something about how cool it was that Tommy Bangs is mentioned at the end setting fire to something. She didn’t remember it and got it out to look for it. Wasn’t in her copy. We started going through and comparing and she had never read the full version of the book! It was always that same condensed one similar to what I’d had when I was younger. They did not say condensed or abridged on them anywhere that we noticed. > > I’d bet it would be kind of wonderful to read an old favorite that has new parts! Even if they are small little things. I puzzled about this quite a while before I realized you were talking about _Little Men._ ---
**Author:** ![Raguleader](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/258eb7/32.png) [@Raguleader](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Raguleader)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2009, 2:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-the-real-book/491817/52 "2009-04-06T14:52:06Z")
Read the first Horatio Hornblower novel _Beat to Quarters_ as part of a Readers’ Digest Condensed Books collection. Great book. Years and years later, I managed to score the entire Horatio Hornblower series of books for $70 total at a Half Price Books (go me!) Anyhow, I read \*Beat to Quarters \*again, and imagine my surprise when I stumbled upon various stuff that hadn’t been there before, especially after the climax of the action. In particular, IIRC, they took out a scene in the condensed version where Captain Hornblower confronts El Supremo for the last time, while El Supremo is a prisoner aboard a Spanish ship. He’s been chained to the mainmast of the ship, and alternately declares that he has had himself chained as a whim, and desperately begging anyone around him to release him. His Spanish captors, Hornblower’s allies only since halfway through the book, look on with amusement, both at El Supremo’s suffering and Hornblower’s shocked reaction to it. Thematically, this bit is pretty important to the first three Hornblower novels (in each book, he deals with some high-and-mighty type in different ways, El Supremo, a madman and a rebel leader, Admiral Leighton, husband of the woman Hornblower loves and his commanding officer, and the Comte du Gracay, a French nobleman who shelters Hornblower and whose widowed daughter-in-law Hornblower has an affair with. Each of these guys is a leader in a different way and for different reasons, and each looses something different in the stories because of his actions. El Supremo is imprisoned and likely hung by the Spanish, Admiral Leighton is killed in battle leading a daring raid against a French base, and the Comte du Gracay loses all of his children to the French Revolution (the three sons killed fighting for the Revolutionary forces, his daughter in law later killed fighting for the Bourbons after Napoleon returns to France) ---
**Author:** ![yandoodan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/d6d6ee/32.png) [@yandoodan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/yandoodan)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2009, 4:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-the-real-book/491817/53 "2009-04-06T16:12:37Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#): > > Disney’s _Sword in the Stone_ doesn’t do it justice. Neither does the musical _Camelot_. Not by a long shot. Especially the folm version. folm? “Friends of Lake McQueeney”?😕 [http://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/FOLM](http://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/FOLM) ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2009, 4:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-the-real-book/491817/54 "2009-04-06T16:19:25Z")
> [@Raguleader](#): > > Read the first Horatio Hornblower novel _Beat to Quarters_ as part of a Readers’ Digest Condensed Books collection. Great book. Years and years later, I managed to score the entire Horatio Hornblower series of books for $70 total at a Half Price Books (go me!) > > Anyhow, I read \*Beat to Quarters \*again, and imagine my surprise when I stumbled upon various stuff that hadn’t been there before, especially after the climax of the action. In particular, IIRC, they took out a scene in the condensed version where Captain Hornblower confronts El Supremo for the last time, while El Supremo is a prisoner aboard a Spanish ship. He’s been chained to the mainmast of the ship, and alternately declares that he has had himself chained as a whim, and desperately begging anyone around him to release him. His Spanish captors, Hornblower’s allies only since halfway through the book, look on with amusement, both at El Supremo’s suffering and Hornblower’s shocked reaction to it. > > Thematically, this bit is pretty important to the first three Hornblower novels (in each book, he deals with some high-and-mighty type in different ways, El Supremo, a madman and a rebel leader, Admiral Leighton, husband of the woman Hornblower loves and his commanding officer, and the Comte du Gracay, a French nobleman who shelters Hornblower and whose widowed daughter-in-law Hornblower has an affair with. Each of these guys is a leader in a different way and for different reasons, and each looses something different in the stories because of his actions. > > El Supremo is imprisoned and likely hung by the Spanish, Admiral Leighton is killed in battle leading a daring raid against a French base, and the Comte du Gracay loses all of his children to the French Revolution (the three sons killed fighting for the Revolutionary forces, his daughter in law later killed fighting for the Bourbons after Napoleon returns to France) Holy crap, that confrontation was absolutely pivotal for Hornblower’s development as a character (as well as being a powerful scene in its own right). To leave it out is nothing short of criminal. :eek: ---
**Author:** ![Blue\_Mars](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/9de053/32.png) [@Blue\_Mars](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blue_Mars)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2009, 5:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-the-real-book/491817/55 "2009-04-07T05:39:06Z")
Now that you mention it, I did think “Finite Jest” was lacking something! ---
**Author:** ![ajdebosco](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ecd19e/32.png) [@ajdebosco](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ajdebosco)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2009, 6:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-the-real-book/491817/56 "2009-04-07T18:20:39Z")
My Grandmother had a stack of _“Classics Illustrated”_ that I devoured voraciously every time we visited for an overnight. I prided myself by having read Moby Dick, The Sea Wolf, The Gold Bug, Last of the Mohicans, Bring em Back Alive, Three Musketeers, Count of Monte Cristo, Robinson Crusoe, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Alice in Wonderland and dozens of others before I was in fifth grade. She must have had seventy five of the hundred and fifty or so published in the forties and fifties, and we weren’t allowed to remove more than one at a time from the shelf, and certainly never take one home, so that the other grandkids could all enjoy all of them. Perhaps the biggest shock was the enormous difference in volume with the real Moby Dick, but I think I enjoyed the Lewis Carrol comic book every bit as much as the real Alice in later life. ---
**Author:** ![kapntoad](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/82dd89/32.png) [@kapntoad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kapntoad)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2009, 7:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-the-real-book/491817/57 "2009-04-07T19:40:35Z")
Sometimes, the point of a book can be completely reversed due to inopportune revisions. I have tons of friends who have the version of the Bible without the gospels of Thomas, Judas and such. They’ve got such a different perception of the importance of the church hierarchy! ---
**Author:** ![paperbackwriter](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/53a042/32.png) [@paperbackwriter](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/paperbackwriter)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2009, 1:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-the-real-book/491817/58 "2009-04-08T01:23:26Z")
> [@The\_Superhero](#): > > I wound up picking “Gulliver’s Travels” off the shelf for my book report. What it was doing on a 6th-grade classroom bookshelf, I have no idea, but it was definitely not a “Children’s Version.” Suffice to say, 18th Century social satire was just a wee bit over my 11-year-old head. > > I read it again many years later in college English Lit, and said, “Oh, now I get it!” I suppose it’s a good thing “A Modest Proposal” wasn’t sitting on the bookshelf next to it… ---
**Author:** ![dropzone](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dropzone/32/7515_2.png) [@dropzone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dropzone)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2009, 3:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-the-real-book/491817/59 "2009-04-08T03:35:49Z")
I have a copy of _The Last of the Mohicans_ with a note in the front stating that, though it was unabridged, some effort had been made to clean up Cooper’s spelling and grammar; efforts, I wonder, that may not have been necessary with his contemporaries. Perhaps there was even more to Twain’s [Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses](http://etext.virginia.edu/railton/projects/rissetto/offense.html) than are obvious to the modern reader. OTOH, when I was in _Macbeth_ in HS our script was not only complete, but was printed only on the right-hand page, with annotations on the left. Damn, our education extended into our extracurricular activities! ---
**Author:** ![TwistofFate](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/cdc98d/32.png) [@TwistofFate](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TwistofFate)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2009, 11:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-the-real-book/491817/60 "2009-04-08T11:19:39Z")
> [@AppallingGael](#): > > A while ago, I decided to fill a gap in my education and read “Black Beauty”. Then I noticed it was the “young readers” version, or some such. It was still pretty sad for all that. I got the worst of both worlds. after seeing a movie once called “Black Beauty” I was very suprised to find out the book was about a horse. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-the-real-book/491817.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-the-real-book/491817.md?page=4)