Finally! The house is clean.
I swept 30 or 40 of my books off the table and stacked them on top of a bookcase. Then I extracted my husband’s dirty sneakers from a sports paraphernalia pile (UNDER THE BUFFET!) and put them in a laundry basket, along with unidentifiable sports garments.
Finally I sat down with a book. THIS IS SO GOOD, I thought as I devoured a short story. But the story seemed to end abruptly (and sappily) halfway through page 127: “…he slips in beside her, and in minutes, he, too, is asleep.” The rest of the page was blank. Wow! Terrible ending!
I flipped the page. It begins with the end of a sentence, “strident—the sounds of a quarrel.” The beginning of that sentence is missing on page 127, along with a paragraph or two. And so I will never know what happened between the nap and the quarrel. It is a printing (or non-printing) error.
I’ve been here before. Once I had to take back a Sara Paretsky book because fifty pages were missing in the middle. Another time I wrote to a publisher because pages were missing from Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog. They sent me a new book.
I won’t bother to write for a replacement of this (mostly) splendid book, because I know I won’t read it again.
Is this good sense or giving up?