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| Hearsay: |
I shudder. Self-proclaimed bookninja fan Kerry delurks to tip this tidbit of disturbing news (fourth item) about a publisher who will be (trash) compacting the classics:
Despite the trend for new-look classics lists, no publisher has dared to meddle with the texts – until now. Weidenfeld & Nicolson is to launch a list of edited literary classics, called Compact Editions. It claims that market research shows many readers are put off by the “elitist” image of classics and by their daunting length and small print. So the Compact Editions – slogan “Great Books in Half the Time” – have been “sympathetically edited” down to fewer than 400 pages each. Weidenfeld insists that the novels retain the core plot, characters and historical background. The first six titles – Anna Karenina, Vanity Fair, David Copperfield, The Mill on the Floss, Moby-Dick and Wives and Daughters – are to be released in May and will doubtless be snapped up by students eager to cut down their reading time.
Author Jenny Ditski comments on her blog:
Who are these people who want to read scapelled classics? They are very, very busy, but they’re just as entitled to feel cultured as anyone. For some reason (a hangover from their grandparents’ education perhaps) they want to be able to say that they’ve read the classics, but they don’t want actually to read them. A novel’s just a story, isn’t it? Just the gist, please, I’m busy, very, very busy. It’s odd, this: a long book of say 800 pages is the same as two gutted books of 400 pages each. So they’re in a hurry to get as many titles under their belts as possible, and sod the structure, subplots and descriptive stuff. Leave out the complexity. This creates a new definition of well read. She read not wisely but too much.
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January 24th, 2007 at 8:34 am
This is old news, at least where childrens’ books are concerned. My father read endless classics that way, although he didn’t realise it until much later. If I recall, his abrdiged version of Martin Chuzzlewit only contained the US trip, for example. But he did develop a great love of Dickens. I don’t know but either those were the editions his school bought, or his parents, no doubt a way to buy a lot of books cheaply.
January 24th, 2007 at 8:58 am
But there’s some difference in making books accessible to children and making them facile for adults. For instance, I introduced Boy Ninja to Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh through Stephen Krensky’s early reader adaptations that made use of the Earnest Shepard “decorations”. It cuts much of the metanarrative and banter in the original stories, but kept enough plot to keep him interested. Later, we switched, almost seamlessly to the unabridged stories. We still read them regularly, particularly the Woozle hunt, in part because he wasn’t turned off by the more plodding parts when he was too young to get them.
The question is, do we really need to do this for adults? And if we do, what does that say about the direction we’re headed in?
January 24th, 2007 at 9:30 am
More than a hundred years ago, Mark Twain said that a classic is a book that everyone wants to have read but no one wants to read. He understood: people want to appear cultured without making any effort.
January 24th, 2007 at 9:40 am
I think these abridged novels are only justified in ESL courses or for very particular circumstances. When I taught at the Lycee Francais de Toronto I had my grade 5 English class put on a sixty minute Macbeth which was, for most of them, their first experience of Shakespeare and their first time acting. We analyzed the text (all Shakespeare, no additions, just deletions) and whenever we got into an interesting bit reverted to the original unabridged text to explore it in detail.
But again, these were 10 year olds, and for many of the English was a second language. These abridged classics for adults remind me of a line in The Importance of Being Earnest about letting our servants do our living for us….
January 24th, 2007 at 12:49 pm
If adults really want to appear literate at cocktail parties without spending long hours poring over the unexpurgated editions of Vanity Fair or War and Peace, they should just read Coles Notes.
January 24th, 2007 at 4:32 pm
Want somthing ultra-compacted?
Try Book-a-Minute Classics
http://www.rinkworks.com/bookaminute/classics.shtml
January 29th, 2007 at 8:01 pm
Articulate asked its readers to summarise a classic in 10 words or less…
Taming of the Shrew (abridged by Alex)
Katherina: “Grrrrr”
Petruchio: “Down Girl!”
Katherina: “Purrrr”
Want more? Go to: http://www.abc.net.au/news/arts/articulate/200701/s1835855.htm