Missing Chapters and Winter's Nights

My husband and I have been reading The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman aloud together. It is a decidedly wintry book, so we read the first half last winter, then put it aside in the spring and have just picked it back up. We were happily reading about arctic temperatures and Alethia meters when we noticed a printing error in the book: chapters 15 and 16 had been printed twice, chapters 17 and 18 were missing. This left us with a pretty serious problem: what happens next?

My first thought when we discovered the error was another half-finished book I left behind somewhere in Italy. Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore by Italo Calvino (English translation: If on a winter's night a traveler) is a novel all about the joy of reading. The bookworm protagonist settles in all comfy on the sofa for a good read, dives into an intriguing tale, but is jarred out of the authorial spell part way through when he realizes a large portion of the book is missing. He sets out on a quest that leads him to bookstores, libraries, publishers' offices, and obscure university departments, in search of the rest of the manuscript. Along the way he encounters nine more incomplete manuscripts (each more captivating than the next, and yes, we get to read them all) international intrigue, and romance with a mysterious girl. The Calvino book is the kind of novel meant to savor: by which I mean turning the pages in wild feverishness then, like the protagonist, stepping back for awhile to ponder the significance of what it is you've read. It's the sort of book that will stay in your head years after you should have forgotten it.

Real life, alas, is not so fun and exciting as fiction.

In my own attempt to find the rest of The Golden Compass, I contacted the publisher. Random House customer service could not send me an electronic copy of the missing chapters (Random House, Inc./Yearling owns the rights to both my defective book and the eBook version) nor would they replace the book. They advised me to contact the seller. A phone call to Barnes and Noble customer service ended in a stubborn adherence to their 30 day exchange policy. Of course I knew about their policy before I called, but I mistakenly believed they had an interest in readers, that a bookseller would understand that readers don't want to thumb through the book to check for printing errors before they read it. Turns out B&N doesn't understand the reader, but they are excellent at moving product- defective or otherwise. Even when I said I'd be happy with an electronic copy of the missing chapters, they were unable to help me. So at this point I was stuck with a grave conundrum for the avid reader: I couldn't find out what happened next. My solution? Three bucks and change at fictionwise.com. Less romantic than Calvino's Winter's Night, but at least now I can learn Lyra's fate!