Reader's Digest Condensed books

Readers of this blog may well be surprised to see the title above. I am guessing that you, like me, firmly believe that books should be read unabridged; abridging books seems unnatural, almost like mutilating them. But I have to admit that when I was a child and young teenager, I sometimes liked reading Reader's Digest Condensed books. What an odd medley of books (mostly novels) each volume contained! Each included about five books, five tastes of five different worlds. Opening up a new volume, one never knew what one might find. Reading these condensed versions allowed me to read many books I probably wouldn't have read otherwise, especially when we lived in India and didn't have easy access to libraries with books in English. Sometimes these volumes introduced me to new authors, and I would later seek out and read other (unabridged) novels by those authors. So, although I haven't read any of them for decades, I find I have affectionate memories of those solid, uniformly gold-trimmed volumes that looked so impressive sitting in a row on a bookshelf, each containing such surprising mixtures of reading experiences.