Book Finds: One Hundred Best Novels Condensed

All my life, I've haven't been able to resist picking up old books I stumble across because you just never know what you might come across.  After all, they were published for a reason and a specific intended audience, and you might be part of that intended audience even years and years later.  One Hundred Best Novels Condensed: Four Volumes Combined into One, edited by Edwin A. Grozier is one of my latest snags - for all of fifty cents - and it was meant to be.

 The book is over 500 pages long and includes three-to-five-page summaries of what were considered to be some of the "one hundred best novels" in 1931 when the book was printed. I see, though, that Best Novels was first printed in 1919 (in four separate volumes?), so maybe it's the best choices as of 1919.  Either way, most of the titles will be familiar to anyone fairly well versed in the classics, although there are a few that I have absolutely never heard of.  The plot summaries were written by three different men (Grozier himself, Charles E.L. Wingate, and Charles H. Lincoln) and the style differences are fairly obvious.  Some of the summaries are actual recaps in the voice of one of the three men and others are done more in the voices of the original authors, including direct quotes from the originals (I definitely prefer the latter style).  Each summary also includes a one-page biography of the book's author, so there is a lot of information packed into these faded green covers.

The reason I like this little book so much is that the plot summaries are exactly what I need sometimes to remind me of the intricacies of the plot lines of books I may have read decades earlier; these days I can barely remember the details of the books I read last month.  The fact that it's also a quick way to choose something from the past that I still haven't read is just an added bonus (not to mention that it also allows me to pretend to myself that I actually read something I know I'll never get around to reading).  This one will be receiving some more wear and tear in the coming years.