Today I picked up from my school library the book 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. I’ve read loads of books involving ships and I thought it would be a good read. It was an unabridged version, but it didn’t make me worry too much.

Then I started to read. Somehow, this book managed to make an encounter with a gigantic sea mammal (compared to a UNICORN at a certain point in the book, wtf) seem boring. Basically, the crew and the main character, a professor, are on a boat. The professor starts discussing the creature they are hunting for. Normally this would be somewhat interesting, a gigantic sea creature being described. However, the book launches into, when the professor is attempting to explain to a crewman named Ned the power of this “unicorn”: “Very well, when you dive, Ned, as many times thirty-two feet of water as there are above you, so many times does your body bear a pressure equal to that of the atmosphere, that is to say, 15 lbs. for each square inch of its surface. It follows then, that at 320 feet this pressure =  that of 10 atmospheres, of 100 atmospheres at 3200 feet, and of 1000 atmospheres at 32,000 feet, that is, about 6 miles; which is equivalent to saying that, if you could attain this depth in the ocean, each square 3/8 of an inch of the surface of your body would bear a pressure of 5600 lbs…” and it continues on. I could sort of figure that out, but personally I would have just summed it up as, “THE MAMMAL IN THE OCEAN HAS BEEN PROVEN TO BE STRONG. IT DIVES REALLY DEEP AND IT DOESN’T DIE!” but of course that isn’t how it works in books.

However, reading part of this book made me think about unabridged books. I don’t mind them. In fact, when I was younger I read the unabridged version of Kidnapped, and it wasn’t that hard to understand. However, they sometimes are a pain because books today aren’t written the same way. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. I remember being in fifth grade and picking up two versions of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table books. One was unabridged, one was some special “Classics” type version of the book. While the unabridged version was over my head (if you’ve ever read part of it, you’ll get my point) at the time, the “Classics” version I found to be boring and not nearly as interesting.

Because of my experiences with books, I’ve decided that it must depend on the book. To sum these 400+ words up… Some unabridged books are rambling, oh dear wtf is going on type books, while some edited versions are condensed and don’t give you the full experience of the story.