Early Adventures in Adult Reading – Reader's Digest Condensed Books

I first remember discovering a Reader's Digest Condensed Book (RDCB) in my grandmother's house, when I was about ten. It was one of the first truly "adult" books I read, and then I started dipping into the others that were hanging around her house. I was a precocious reader with a very large vocabulary for a fifth-grader, but certainly some of the adult situations and plots were way beyond my grasp. Of course, like some of the other childhood bookworms I speak with now, that didn't stop me. My reading was not as supervised as some, however, since I was an only child who was often left to my own devices.

This first RDCB was the Winter, 1959 edition, so Grandmom must have had it for a while. I don't remember reading all the books that were condensed in this edition, which contained The Admen by Shepherd Mead, The Rainbow and the Rose by Australian writer Nevil Shute, Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris by Paul Gallico, The Ugly American by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick, The White Room by Elizabeth Burdick and Woman of Straw by Catherine Arley.

I'm sure The Ugly American was way beyond my comprehension at the time, though I know I tried to work my way through it. I have no recollection of The White Room or Woman of Straw. But I was utterly entranced by 'Mrs. Arris, since it spoke to my girlhood ambition of becoming a fashion designer and having what I presumed would be an appropriately glamorous life in New York, and eventually living abroad (similarly fed by watching such movies as Breakfast at Tiffany's, Funny Face, Cover Girl and Roberta on TV with Grandmom) That didn't quite happen, but I became a lifelong fan of Paul Gallico, and have a number of his books in my collection. It also introduced me to Nevil Shute, the English/Australian writer, author of On the Beach and A Town Like Alice. His work, like many other mid-century 20th century writers, has now faded from view. 

I just took a quick look at The Admen – a sort of precursor to what became Mad Men. The author worked in advertising but his greatest success was How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying which was adapted into the blockbuster Broadway musical and movie, both starring Robert Morse.

Some quick research reveals that The White Room was a fantasy novel about a somewhat unusual Maine family, and Woman of Straw was an espionage novel, translated from the French, and later made into a movie with Sean Connery.