/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.23242859]

Is it ever acceptable to read abridged versions of books?

[Anonymous No.23242874]

>>23242859
Why not?

[Anonymous No.23242880]

>>23242859
A lpt of classic books are pure waffle. So yeh, why not.
Case in point, 1001 Nights. How many of those thousand and one nights had anything decent happening? Another case, Memoirs of Casanova, how many times did he go on the same pages long tangent about being a heartbroken faggot?
Unless you intend to seriously study a text, reading an abridged version is perfectly fine.

[Anonymous No.23242891]

>>23242859
Yes, because I need room for my one shelf. I also don't have the time to read through 3-4 1000 page books with tiny text.

[Anonymous No.23242899]

>>23242880
This. The only reason not too is if you are some type of completionist or for some type of bizarre bragging rights. Casanova’s memoirs are great, one of my favorites, but I couldn’t imagine going through the whole multi thousand page volume set. The amount of filler would probably tarnish my opinion of it. One has to ask themselves why they read. If you read a selection of Pliny and take something positive from it, that positive can’t be ignored and should be all that counts. Is it a big deal that you don’t read the outdated and boring Pliny sections, or Plutarch’s Moralia that is a chore? The only abridgment I’d be skeptical of is something like The Count of Monte Cristo. It is a novel. There is plenty of superfluous material or stories in books like Casanova, Plutarch, Decameron, Arabian Nights, Pliny

[Anonymous No.23242912]

I'd say it depends on the circumstance. If it's a relatively normal sized book, I think it's lazy, but it doesn't matter that much.
In the case of longer series like the Natural History, It's incredibly unlikely for somebody to read all 37 books in their entirety. Even then, if somebody did decide to read it in it's entirety, some parts of it can be difficult to find in print. By that point, the abridged version is sort of necessary, and almost a separate work, almost like a highlight reel to make people care about the actual entirety of it.
I suppose that could be said for a lot of abridged works, but in the case of the natural history the entirety of the abridged version isn't even as long as the first three books.

[Anonymous No.23242913]

>Unabridged Mahabharata
>Unabridged Journey to the West
>Unabridged Le morte d'Arthur
>Unabridged Clarissa

[Anonymous Mogul No.23242922]

FUCKING CASUALS

[Anonymous No.23243145]

Les Miserable is best read as abridged first

[Anonymous No.23243332]

Read an abridged version of Journey to the West, which I think was a good idea. Ain’t nobody got time to read the whole thing and it was enough to get the general gist and spirit across.

[Anonymous No.23243374]

For 99% of poets you don't need anything but a Selected Poems.
We've all made the mistake of getting a Complete or Collected and finding this out the hard way.

[Helpless Investor No.23243419]

Yes, the Pali canon is 90% repetitive paragraphs, an unabridged version would be unreadable

[Anonymous No.23243425]

>>23242859
Yes in the case of Gibbons history of Rome.

[Anonymous No.23243851]

>>23242859
>Is it ever acceptable to read abridged versions of books?
Abridgements of multivolume works of history can be quite good depending on how talented the editor is. Abridged fiction is very hit and miss.

>>23243145
>Les Miserable is best read as abridged first
Agreed, I've read pretty good abridgments of Les Misérables, Don Quixote and some Dickens. Personally, I wouldn't bother reading abridged versions of The Count of Monte Cristo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and War and Peace.

[Anonymous No.23243969]

>>23242859
The Golden Bough would be much better as an abridgment IMO. Very interesting premise but you are just beaten over the head with a million one paragraph examples of cultures throughout the world and time.

[Anonymous No.23244012]

The problem with abridged editions is they obviously select what to include or not. You could just get a complete edition and skip what you want

[Anonymous No.23244027]

prof said he did the unthinkable and read the Natural History in its entirety and was surprised that he found very inflammatory shittalk about Nero buried deep in dry autism.

[Anonymous No.23244042]

The thing is that with an abridged version you aren't actually reading the work. At that point why not just read a review or skip it entirely? Yeah lots of books have pointless tedium - hell that's the whole of chinese literature - but you can't know that before actually reading the unabridged version

[Anonymous No.23244056]

i don't trust other people to decide which parts are important and which aren't

[Anonymous No.23245521]

>>23242859
I feel cheated when it is not written in big letters that it is an abridged version

bought Ramon Llull's Blanquerna some months ago and it wasn't the complete work

[Anonymous No.23245539]

>>23242859
Depends on the book. Something like Gibbon, sure.

[Anonymous No.23246385]

>>23242859
I read the complete Oriental epic "Monkey" but really I would not have missed much in an abridged version, and missed out on a lot of repetitive stuff...

[Anonymous No.23246789]

>>23242880
Mr ESL, “waffle” as a verb means to go back and forth on an opinion by changing it repeatedly. It isn’t a term used for book quality and is never used as a noun anyways.

[Anonymous No.23248352]

>>23246789
Not ESL, just British. Seethe at our colliquial words, guv'nor

[Anonymous No.23248365]

>>23242859
It's acceptable if that's all you can find, yeah.
Just letting a publisher tell you what is important within a book is astoundingly gay. Why not just get the unabridged book for yourself and decide which parts are important? You don't have to read the whole thing.

[Anonymous No.23248374]

>>23246789
American English is ESL my dear boy

[Anonymous No.23249503]

>>23242859
you can start with the abridged version and then read the real version. sometimes the abridged version is only missing chapters so you would only need to read the missing chapters

[Anonymous No.23249718]

>>23248374
We use more casual archaisms than you do, Nigel.

[Anonymous No.23251115]

>>23249503
I'm planning on doing the opposite with the Mahabharata. I just started volume 2 of the unabridged. I want to see what got cut from the abridged afterwards.

[Anonymous No.23251477]

>>23242859

NEVER. Read the entire book or not at all. Otherwise you are trusting a modern man who has corrupted these anceint tomes, who has hidden there wisdom. They will leave things out they disagree with, these things are called facts