I’m not a fast reader. I’ve improved with experience and age, but it usually takes me awhile to get through any hefty tome. Still, a good book always seems worth my time, so this has never troubled me—after all, reading’s not the most challenging activity in the world.
Or so I thought. Recent news shows the publishing world is throwing a bone to the less-than-dedicated readers of the world.
British publisher Orion Books recently issued its first set of scaled-down classics, with dozens more so-called “Compact Editions” planned for the future. The publisher slashed thirty to forty percent of each classic work of literature, axing whole chapters at times. The first novels to face the chopping block included Anna Karenina, Vanity Fair, David Copperfield, The Mill on the Floss, Moby Dick and Wives and Daughters.
The publisher, calling their collection great reads “in half the time,” explained its actions as benevolent—people could read more classics and expand their cultural knowledge this way, the publisher emphasized. It claimed that most people thought of “classics” as long, slow, and boring. While that may be true for the average reader, this certainly is not a call to shred old masterworks.
Literature should challenge its readers, and this butchery degrades it for convenience. Instant gratification isn’t everything; cutting more than a third of Tolstoy will hurt the original writing and won’t create a comparable read. The literary experience calls for build-up and foreshadowing on the part of the writer, which, if the reader is patient, can lead to a disarming catharsis. Sometimes this happens to take a thousand pages. If those thousands pages are integral to the author’s masterpiece, then I’ll happily tough that out.
I liked reading the Great Illustrated Classics series as a kid, but this strategy, marketed to adult readers, just promotes laziness. The publisher seems to think a quick read matters more than quality prose. Sparknotes would probably serve a reader better than these watered-down versions.
Convenience permeates everything these days, given the Internet, text messaging, and Ipods, and this convenience has begun to extend to language itself. The BBC recently published an article about the Simplified Spelling Society . The group works to standardize the English language, making spelling more phonetic and flexible. Fears of instant-message jargon leap to mind for me (spellings of “I luv u” and “good nite”). I’ll grant you that English is a messy language, but precision can be positive, and I know I would be driven insane by a world where “ennywun” spelled so loosely. Please, folks, let’s just try to use the language we’ve all agreed on.
Of course, these events are mere trends of the moment and unlikely to make any dent in the literary world. Anyone with an inclination to seriously read Tolstoy or Dickens in the first place will likely opt for the real deal, and a small-time organization that boycotts spelling bees is not going to overturn the power of Funk and Wagnalls (or Strunk and White, for that matter).
For those who don’t relish the hundreds of pages of War and Peace, though, rest assured. Orion Books promises another set of compact classics in September: Bleak House, Middlemarch, Jane Eyre, The Count of Monte Cristo, North and South and The Portrait of a Lady. Personally, I think I’m going to keep plodding through the big literary works page by page—reading all the pages, not just 60 percent—and feel satisfied with that.
4 responses so far ↓
1
AlexStreiff
// Jul 17, 2007 at 1:02 pm
This is defiantly an issue I have thought a lot about recently. Mostly because I was searching for a copy of Clarissa by Samuel Richardson, which is exceptionally long. In my search of several book stores, not one carried the unabridged version. It makes me cringe to think of reading a cut version of any book, but luckily I finally came across an uncut version of Clarissa, which now taunts me from my book shelve with Anna Karenina, Against the Day, and my growing collection of thousand plus page books that I have not had the time to read yet.
2
parishkl
// Jul 17, 2007 at 10:45 pm
I hate to sound like an elitist or anything like that, but I think if someone goes after these radically abridged versions with the sole purpose of gaining “cultural knowledge”, what they’re most likely doing is not gaining true knowledge from these works at all, but rather attempting to establish intellectual bragging rights.
I’m less concerned with the butchered products of this trend than disgusted with the cultural movement behind it – humanity wants everything to be easy and fast. But we have to keep in mind that hookers are easy and fast, as are Big Macs. The fact that publishers are whoring greasy byproduct editions of humanity’s greatest cultural lodestones is sickening. And sad. Why write great literature at all? Why not just watch Friends reruns, eat takeout, and be done with it?
With these cut versions of the classics, a person can gain just enough passing information to be able to hold up their end at a cocktail party, but that is not true understanding at all. The only thing worse than someone who has no understanding of a thing is someone who only pretends to. It is the worst kind of ignorance, because it is deliberate.
I submit that these books are the result of a culture which has lost all respect for quality in the worship of convenience. With this attitude towards literature, will the next generation even have anything worth remembering?
This kind of sleazy consumerist pandering is insulting to our intelligence as a literary community, and the saddest part? John Q. America will probably eat it up.
3
Tim Hayes
// Jul 18, 2007 at 11:11 am
Right on, John.
Duration is crucial to the experience of a longer work. In great novels like the ones you mention above, the effect is created by an accretion of detail, an interweaving of storylines, a pattern rendered ever-more complex. When you consider the original meaning of “text” — to weave — and envision the larger work as a kind of tapestry made out of words, the idea of cutting out huge sections is something like hacking the tapestry to shreds (in order to make it look better, no less).
If the goal of reading a mangled masterpiece is simply to create the illusion of being cultured, why not (like you say) just read the Cliffs Notes? I remember one summer I spent reading The Brothers Karamozov with a friend of mine, while we were both (relatively) employed by our school library. During the long read, we would talk about what we’d noticed. We both picked out different details, felt different intensities, attractions, repulsions. It was something like a quest we were both undertaking from our swivel-chairs. I can’t imagine reading an abridged version of that novel. The pacing is so perfect, so intentional. The easily memorable plot events are only meaningful as moments along the spectrum of that greater duration.
What is to be gained by hacking up an intricate work? Either read the real thing or spend your time elsewhere.
4
Jamie Scott
// Jul 18, 2007 at 11:57 am
Great post! People’s growing laziness toward literature and the English language has bothered me for quite some time, as well. I think I will be fighting the “instant-message jargon” battle for the rest of my life, but the lack of reading appreciation might be next on my list of annoyances. I, too, read the Great Illustrated Classics series as a child, but that series was meant to whet the appetite of younger readers and get them interested in the full versions as they got older. Unfortunately, shortened versions like those are beginning to supplement the real thing for adults.
Sometimes I think audio books fall into the same category as these abridged versions of the classics. Is it so impossible to find time to read that now someone has to read to us? Although the books-on-tape are great during long travels or for those who cannot read, many times they’re used just because “readers” are too lazy to pick up a book. However, if some people can still appreciate the art of reading the classics instead of listening, then hopefully they’ll reject the idea of the shortened novel, too. What’s the satisfaction in reading if you’re not getting the whole story? So although it’s hard for me to find the time to finish a four hundred-page novel right now, I think I’ll also stick with the real thing and find the time as I can.
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