Saturday, February 5, 2011

The TBR Pile -- A Cautionary Tale

  One of the challenges I'm participating in this year is the TBR Pile Challenge, which aims to clean some of the oldest books off of my to-read shelves.  So today as I was getting ready to head out to my French class in Chicago, I picked up one of the books I've chosen for this challenge - The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant - to read on the train.  I started reading and was enjoying the story, but at page 22 - when a key character was about to be introduced - the page number then jumped to page 263!  The last 30 pages of the book are here (as well as at the end) but pages 23-54 are missing.   I found a store coupon inserted in the book with an expiry date of 2/13/2009 so I figure I purchased this book in January of that year; had I picked this book off of my shelf a little bit (ok, a lot) sooner I could have exchanged it at the store.

  As it is, I'll see if I can get a copy of the book at the library, but fellow book hoarders take note -- learn from my experience and at least page through the book once you've purchased it (or preferably before you do).

  (I won't even go into the trauma of being only 25 minutes into an hour and a half train journey without anything to read .....)

6 comments:

  1. Oh my!! That's horrible!! I think I would go out of my mind - especially being stuck on the train like that!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yowch! I had a similar experience with a vintage book I bought. Fortunately, the missing pages didn't make much difference...but it was disappointing to fing the pages missing. Now I need to find another copy....

    ReplyDelete
  3. Too funny (well, not really, but). I had the exact same experience last year when I was reading Asylum by Patrick McGrath and thought I was the only one - I took a picture of it lest people thought I was fibbing, but I was aghast. How could it be that it could make it past quality control or whatever may be there to ensure something like this doesn't happen? Thank goodness my local indie bookstore had a complete copy, I would have gone nuts to have to wait for the book to come in to read what happened next in the scene that I was reading. I'm sorry you had to go through this!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Unfortunately happens pretty often. It's simply an error in the binding process (I'll bet it's exactly 32 pages that are duplicated/missing.) If the book is no longer readily available in bookstores, you should try sending it back to the publisher with a note about the problem. They should replace it for you for free. But it probably will take a little while - maybe a month.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Oh, poor Bibliosue! I sure hope the scenery on the train ride was interesting ;)

    ReplyDelete
  6. That does sound like a terrible shock :( Thanks for the warning, I don't always go through a book before buying it (and putting it on the shelf to join the rest of the TBR pile)...

    ReplyDelete

What do you think? Good or bad, I'd love to hear from you (but be nice - I'm sensitive!)