One of *those* Families...

Was yours one of those families? Ours was. Every month the Reader's digest arrived by mail.  Every month we received that month's selection of 4 condensed books.  It had been going on for years before I realised what all the dull looking books on the bookshelf were & by then they were 4 deep & counting.

My mother, which is astounding now I think about it, never monitored my reading & some of it was extremely unsuitable indeed. Some of it gave me nightmares ~ for years & years. A lot of it was American centric & to this day there are things about America I just do not understand. I developed an early distaste for many American male writers ~ Hemingway, Steinbeck, Melville, Mailer. They left me cold ~ & bored.  Very bored. It wasn't just that they were too old for me ~ & they were~ it was a writing style I found deeply ugly & for me ugly writing is unforgivable.

I read most of these cover to cover & most were so completely forgettable I don't retain anything of what I read.  There were, I remember, a lot of war stories.  Of these, odd images emerge from, I'm quite sure, completely different books. There was the red headed naval green horn with the enormous suitcase that sprang open revealing a lone toothbrush...the lovers clinging together as the abandoned ship sank...the aerial dogfights that were not quite Bigglesworthy...& the momentous discovery that sinking ships spilled oil & oil burned & death by fiery water was a very real thing.

I was about 10 & even heavily edited a good deal of this material was decidedly unsuitable. Take the medical story about a Rhesus negative trial whose denouement depended on the revelation of a prior, undisclosed abortion...sadly by then I had already read Dymphna Cusack's Come in Spinner, which covered all that & more ~ but no thanks to Reader's Digest. I still remember the weight & feel of that book but how I came to read it I have no idea.  It was considered highly controversial & that was in it's abridged form! I had no idea.  I merely read it.

I must have been on an Australian kick because it was then I also read My Brother, Jack ~ um,...yeah...The Shiralee, beautiful; They're a Weird Mob, & both Stead & Astely & Hal Porter's classic, Watcher on the Cast Iron Balcony.  Picnic at Hanging Rock, marginally more suitable, came later. Somehow I missed those more truly Australian classics: We of the Never~Never, A Little Bush Princess, Carpentaria or the wildly popular The Thornbirds. Much, much later I found Helen Garner & her lovely, lyrical, destructive, sordid, evocative tales.

I do remember, though not in any detail because it horrified me, My Boy, John, Who Went to Sea~James Vance Marshall.  Beautifully written, atmospheric & emotionally shattering it was as mesmerizing as it was horrifying. I've never been game to revisit it & see if it's anything like I remember it. Reader's Digest Condensed was already more than enough.

It was in their condensed form I first read Rumor Godden.  To this day she is probably my all time favourite author. Godden has an incredible sense of place combined with a sparse & very beautiful writing style & a deep spirituality. I was charmed by the revelations of cloistered nuns, the silence, the space within structure, though the first thing of hers I ever read [& loved] was The Greengage Summer. *sigh* The Battle Villa Fiorita was also in condensed form...

True to form I worked backwards discovering The Kitchen Madonna & The Diddakoi & only much later, when I really should have outgrown them Miss Happiness & Miss Flower, Little Plum & The Doll's House.

These days the thrift shops overflow with copies of R.D condensed books. I wonder if they still produce them or if the reading public has matured somewhat. Just the same there are one or two on my own shelves: I Take Thee, Serenity because it has been the only way I have been able to procure a copy of this book & The Mountain is Young because I loved Han Suyin's A many Splendoured Thing & always wonder how her life eventually turned out. Not well it seems. Sometimes things are best left alone.