fuddlyduddly

 Condensed books are almost always a terrible idea, chopping out and rewording passages to shorten them or make them more palatable for readers. The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson, is one of my favourite novels, and was subjected to this treatment in the Spring 1960 edition of Readers Digest Condensed Books. I found it by chance in a little lending library, and was very curious how this book was condensed, since Jackson has such a singular and unique voice as an author; it was worse than I was expecting.  Below is a chart of the changes as I've logged them; the original text is on the left, the Reader's Digest edition on the right. Any text deleted from the original is highlighted in red, any text added to the RD edition is in green. I've tried my best to keep the paragraph formatting as it is found in the RD edition, but there are times where the amount of text deleted made formatting this in a chart very difficult.  It's interesting to note what has and ha