"World's Greatest Books" Review

When I purchased (for free – as these books are in the public domain) Volumes 03, 06, 08 (Fiction) and 12 (History) of this series; I was expecting to find them to be large anthologies of complete texts.  What I received were 4000 location length books that contained abridged digests of classic books.  For many, a digest is satisfactory.  I prefer to read complete texts.  In this series, however, the digests were so abridged that the book was almost unrecognizable.

In Frankenstein, for example, the digest skips from Victor Frankenstein’s arrival at college directly to part three.  While I found the complete text of Frankenstein to be boring, and may have made much shorter work of this shortened text, I also find that some of the key elements of the book are missing.  An example of this is that in the complete text, a murder is committed, and an innocent person stands accused of the crime.  That fact becomes very relevant later in the book.  In the abridged version, the murder occurs, but the resolution of the crime by the courts is omitted, which makes the later repercussions less relevant.

That being said, the abridgement was fairly thoughtfully done, and was able to eliminate most of the very boring parts of the book.  These droning sections tended to be long and filled with Victor Frankenstein’s internal angst.  Much of this is eliminated and the reader is left with a text that is, while much shorter, also far less boring.

My concern here is that not all of these classic texts would be the word filled written nap that Frankenstein turned out to be, and that interesting or significant text might be lost in the abridgement.  In addition, I worry that someone who was purchasing the text for an English or Literature class may believe that they are getting the full text, only to find that they have missed much of what their classmates have learned.

These texts may be fine for a quick overview of the classic fiction (or other genre) contained in them, but I would recommend downloading the complete versions of the books that you wish to read.  All of the books in these editions are in the public domain, so they may be found and downloaded for free.

Don’t own a Kindle, but would like to?  The latest generation of Kindle is available at the following links:  with WiFi only   or with WiFi and 3G.

For comments, questions, and feedback, the author may be contacted at:  unkemptruminations@comcast.net