I was a bit (understatement) shocked to read that Orion Books, a British publishing house, has come up with a series called Compact Editions, where they’ve lopped off about forty percent of the original texts of classics like Anna Karenina, David Copperfield, and Moby Dick, just for the sake of making them more “readable.”

I’m one of those bookworms who loves classics, and as excessively wordy as some of them can be, I think that’s part and parcel of what they are.  I finished reading Anna Karenina (and loved it and plan to reread it) so now I’ll be making my way through Vanity Fair. Strange to say, the reason why I like reading these things is for the drama that the characters get caught up in, which is a lot more interesting than any of the shows on tv these days.

So my recent foray into reading the classics should mean more visits to second-hand bookstores (there’s something so much more appropriate about reading about a story set a hundred years ago from a book where the pages are worn and tinted than in a crisp copy from amazon or Barnes and Noble). But the problem is, most of the quaint little bookshops that carry used books are also often inhabited by a friendly feline or two, dozing contentedly on the shelf, making them off-limits to those of us who are allergic to cats.

August 12th, 2007