Heh, one would think so, except the unabridged version is around 1400 pages!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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”.
I, too, was frantically checking for an unabridged copy. Fortunately, I was doing this online, so I didn’t embarrass myself too much.
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.
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.
I puzzled about this quite a while before I realized you were talking about Little Men.
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)
folm? “Friends of Lake McQueeney”?
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:
Now that you mention it, I did think “Finite Jest” was lacking something!
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.
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!
I suppose it’s a good thing “A Modest Proposal” wasn’t sitting on the bookshelf next to it…
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 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!
after seeing a movie once called “Black Beauty” I was very suprised to find out the book was about a horse.