Seven little Penguins

From Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy:

'...Shakespeare is not merely great but grand, as it were.'
'But only as it were,' said Amit. 'He only looks big in bulk. And I have my own way of reducing that bulk,' he confided. 'You may have noticed that in a typical Collected Shakespeare all the plays start on the right-hand side. Sometimes, the editors bung a picture in on the left to force them to do so. Well, what I do is to take my pen-knife and slit the whole book up into forty or so fascicles. That way I can roll up Hamlet or Timon--and slip them into my pocket. And when I'm wandering around--in a cemetery, say--I can take them out and read them. It's easy on the mind and on the wrists. I recommend it to everyone. I read Cymbeline in just that way on the train here; and I never would have otherwise.'
Kabir smiled, Lata burst out laughing, Pran was appalled, Mr Makhijani gaped and Mr Nowrojee looked as if he were about to faint dead away.
Amit appeared pleased with the effect.

I was more than a bit sceptical about Penguin's Pocket series, 70 short titles by old stalwarts and new authors, released to celebrate its 70th birthday. There was this:

Now, unexpectedly, the titles have provoked outrage and surprise because they include work by only two authors who are not white.

And there was my personal dislike of abridged versions of anything; pocket books are a bit like infotainment, things designed for the appallingly lazy reader who'd be better off frying his brains with whatever's on the tube.
But then there was Allen Lane, the man credited with starting the paperback revolution:
"For all his charm, his quick decisions could be abruptly expressed. Visiting the Australian office in 1961, he furthered his place in publishing legend when he decided to sort out management problems with a last-minute command at the airport. Turning to senior executives, he said: "You're out, you're in, you're out and I'm off."

And then the Penguin Pocket 70s arrived. One of the perks of working as a books columnist and occasional reviewer is that you get to see the full series; if I'd been browsing in a bookstore, I'd have bought maybe 20 of the set, but not the full thing.
What you do with 70 paperbacks is, you spread them out all over the carpet, fight with your partner over who's going to read what first, and then spend the next few days changing your mind about the value of these pocket books. Reluctantly. With some highbrow carping about the inclusion of writers like India Knight or Jamie Oliver, when there's no James Baldwin in sight. But the fun of it is in meeting old friends--hello, Camus, it's been a long time, hey there, O'Hanlon, whassup?--and reading, I'm ashamed to admit, at least a few authors I hadn't come across before--Tony Harrison, Steven Runciman.

The thing is, Vikram Seth was right. At this size, it's absurdly easy to slip ten of these at random into your handbag; even if you've met most of the authors on the list, they jog your memory. It's been years since I re-read Primo Levi's Elements; the Nabokov selection sent me back to Pale Fire and Speak, Memory; and Helen Dunmore, how could I have forgotten her. As the Jabberwock says in this post: "I tell you, the size makes a big psychological difference; maybe I should chop up all the fat books I have to tackle and then put them back together afterwards?"

Here's the first seven on the list:

This was the landmark literary obscenity trial Penguin Books fought thirty years after D H Lawrence's death. From the closing speech for the defence: "Lawrence lived and died suffering from a public opinion, caused by the banning of this book, that he had written a piece of pornography called Lady Chatterley's Lover, and if this case has done nothing else it has for the first time enabled this book to be dragged out into the light of day so that we can see what it really is... All the time, this book was the passionately sincere book of a moralist in the puritan tradition, who believed he had a message for us and the society in which we live, whether we agree with this message or not."

Eric Schlosser: Cogs in the Great Machine

Excerpted from Fast Food Nation, this is a gritty section that covers the suicide of a Colorado rancher, the terrible risks that slaughterhouse workers take, and the dark poetry in the names of their jobs: Knocker, Sticker, Shackler, Rumper, First Legger, Knuckle Dropper, Navel Boner, Splitter Top/ Bottom Butt, Feed Kill Chain. I thought Schlosser did a great job when I read the book in 2002, but these descriptions made me pull out the book for a second reading: "I see: a man reach inside cattle and pull out the kidneys with his bare hands, then drop the kidneys down a metal chute, over and over again, as each animal whizzes by him; a stainless steel rack of tongues; Whizzards peeling meat off decapitated heads, picking them almost as clean as the white skulls painted by Georgia O'Keeffe. We wade through blood that's ankle deep and that pours down drains into huge vats below us."

P D James: Innocent House

This was one of the few Pockets that didn't work for me, possibly because I remember Original Sin, the book from which this section was extracted, too clearly; it's the hassle that accompanies knowing what happens next and why. Someone at Penguin probably had a lot of fun selecting the excerpt: Original Sin starts with the murder of a senior editor at a publishing house.

Nick Hornby: Otherwise Pandemonium

Two short stories from the man who singlehandedly invented Lad Lit; Otherwise Pandemonium has a post-Tivo conceit (what if you could fastforward through television, including stuff that hasn't happened yet?) told by a cloyingly Average Guy narrator. Not A Star starts with a mother discovering that her son has starred, maybe, in a porn film. Strictly subway reading. Which is fine by me; so long as I stay away from the Delhi metro, I don't have to read the thing.

Albert Camus: Summer in Algiers

I had forgotten Camus' essays; I no longer even have them on my shelves, someone borrowed them and never gave them back. But it's better to read them now; as an adolescent, none of his themes--exile, longing, the instability of homelands, the impossibility of recapturing the past--made sense to me; they still don't, but at least I can fake it better now.
"There are no more deserts. There are no more islands. Yet there is a need for them. In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion; in order to serve men better, one has to hold them at a distance for a time. But where else can one find the solitude necessary to vigour, the deep breath in which the mind collects itself and courage gauges its strength? There remain big cities."

Richard Dawkins: The View From Mount Improbable

Consider the fig, urges Dawkins, and takes us from there to an examination of natural selection. But this is a tantalising snippet; you have to read Climbing Mount Improbable and the later works in order to do one of the world's most interesting thinkers justice.

India Knight: On Shopping

On the other hand, there are times when an excerpt is just enough.The Babu is a deeply reluctant shopper. He commits grievous style errors, and like the chap in Dorothy Parker's poem, he doesn't care, he didn't care again today, and he wishes everyone else was made his way. The intimate tone of Knight's guide to looking better, buying and applying the right makeup, how to choose clothes and bonding between mother and children is kind of lost on someone whose style hero is Pigpen, doesn't own makeup, has seven-year-old T-shirts and doesn't have rugrats, but it made me feel suitably girly and Cosmo-ed for about ten minutes.