标签：#hydephp

Making classics more accessible I have a soft spot for mythology and classic stories. I have read most of the books on Abridged Shelf at least once, several of them more than that. But a lot of them are long . Epic poetry is not something you casually get through on a Tuesday evening, and the older translations can be genuinely hard going. The language demands focus, and focus is a resource I do not always have. So I made shorter versions. Abridged Shelf is a free library of public domain classics that I have abridged and modernized. Abridged, not summarized. The distinction matters a lot to me. I am not writing study notes or plot recaps. I take the actual text and condense it: the B-plots that do not carry the story, the scenes that spend forty lines describing a shield, those get compressed down into the beats that matter. What is left is still the story, told in its own voice, just tighter. The other half is the language. A lot of these translations are over a century old, and the English shows it. So I modernize spelling and phrasing into contemporary English. Again, not simplified. This is not a children's edition and I am not dumbing anything down. It is the same book, in language that does not fight you. I also made some editorial calls. For the Greek epics I use the Greek names rather than the Roman ones that a lot of older translations default to, because if we are reading Homer then it should be Athena and not Minerva. Small thing. Matters to me. And as a nod to a certain static site generator I maintain, the first book I abridged was the original Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde . It is already short. Now it is very short. I did a few more by Stevenson after that, mostly because they were quick and I needed to get the workflow right before pointing it at an epic poem. The abridgment process I knew from the start that I needed to use AI for this. I also do not entirely trust AI, which is a useful combination of beliefs to hold at the same time. It me