/u/DabuSurvivor accidentally skips a page while reading Catcher in the Rye, reads an entirely different book

Reminds me of when I read The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. Throughout the entire book, he refers to the protagonist as simply 'the boy'. I read the whole book in one sitting, and thought "Wow, what an interesting and meaningful choice to never give the protagonist a name."

Then I tried discussing the book with someone in class, and discovered I somehow overlooked the very first sentence in the book.

"The boy's name was Santiago."

The guy finally finishes The Stand: "Really glad they beat the Walkin' Dude, but when the hell is King going to explain what killed all those people at the start?"

I watched Schindlers list for the first time without noticing it was a two DVD set, and was treated to a relatively upbeat short film about Germany losing the war while a factory owner and his Jewish staff waited it out while producing faulty armaments.

I couldn't understand why everyone gave it so much credit and why it was not as horrifying or even long as I had heard. Then I found DVD 1.

what a good /r/bestof post actually. Not a comment related to the post its in at all, so its not like it belongs in the sub. ANd its obviously not made up, and is a great and interest comment. Good catch.

edit: omg I can't believe this is my top comment, rip my inbox youguise xD

I had a similar thing with A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch.

My copy (we were given copies at school, used by previous years) had the first page ripped out. So I found myself reading this book about someone called "Shukhov", wondering when the hell Ivan Denisovitch was going to show up.

Until, nearly at the end, I finally happened to see a classmate's copy. The first bloody sentence is "Ivan Denisovich Shukhov [took off his boots or something]".

Mystery solved, but I was a bit pissed off realising that "Ivan" wasn't now going to appear.

We need a subreddit dedicated to book lovers and tell each other to skip what pages so that it would become an entirely new book experience. Something along the lines /r/unexpectedbook

That's pretty epic. I just reread it this year so it's fresh in my mind and I know exactly the parts he's talking about too.

Similar sorta thing happened to me when i accidentally watched the last episode of True Detective first, and skipped the the first one. Needless to say, i was confused as all hell.

I didn't realize my mistake until watching the last episode (for the second time, unknowingly) and thinking, "why are they spending the first 10 minutes of the last episode on a flashback to the first episode?"

edit: grammar

Grave of the Fireflies was like that for me. Apparently both the main characters were shown starving to death right at the start, but I guess I can't identify faces very well so the whole time I was rooting for them to make it and my girlfriend kept trying to convince me they already died, and it turned out she was right and the movie was shitty and depressing.

I didnt know And Then There Were None had an epilogue for like two months. I just closed the book after the The End.

Reminds me of my friend's dad. He went in to see Predator without knowing the premise, and missed the first few minutes with the predator reveal. So he gets in a little late, and is just watching this typical gung ho military action flick. Go America and all that. Then suddenly people just start fucking dying and crazy shit is coming out of the trees, and he has no more idea what's going on as they do. When Jesse Ventura goes ape with that minigun and the plasma cannon blows a hole in him, he's freaking out. To this day he says it was 10x better that way.

tl;dr - Watch predator without the opening scene, it's a military rambo movie that suddenly gets interrupted by horror sci fi from out of left field.

Teaching a course about representations of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery in the new world, I decided to do my students a solid and require the cheapest possible edition of Huck Finn I could find.

I had never imagined that one would abridge such a relatively short and easy novel.

Moreover, it never occurred to me that, in abridging it, one might replace every use of the word slave with the word servant. And I'm pretty sure they also cut out every N word in the whole thing, too. Pretty much any part of the text that revealed what Twain was critiquing--the racism and classism that underlay the supposed charm of Southern culture--had been erased or sanitized.

I realized this when my desk copy arrived, way too late to change the order, but just in time to email the kids not to buy it.

I wish I hadn't thrown away that copy because it would be a comedy goldmine if it weren't so enraging.

Oh ffs. I get ZERO for reading comprehension. One - didn't realise Allie was a male. Two - never knew she/he was dead. I just thought that he missed her and that she was the only one who understood him. To a degree.

Holy shit, /u/DabuSurvivor, you're Reddit famous now! Surprised to see your name on the front page.

Great story btw.

I wonder if everyone who says Holden is nothing more than a "whiny asshole" would say that to the face of someone who suffers from debilitating depression.

This comment will never see the light of day but Im posting anyways.

SPOILERS FOR The Velveteen Rabbit

When I read The Velveteen Rabbit as a small child, I stopped reading it because I was crying so hard. They threw all the child's stuff in a pile to burn because he had a contagious disease or whatever. His favorite toy rabbit was thrown on the pile. The pile was set on fire.

I put the book down and for years I held a grudge against that book for ruining my childhood.

One day in mt late 20's my sister said, "Oh, how much I loved The Velveteen Rabbit."

I replid, "UGH. That fucking book. I hate that fucking book."

My sister looked shocked and said, "Really?? Why?"

"Because they burned his fucking stuffed rabbit, that's why. Assholes."

My sister stared blankly at me for a long while.

"Did you read the whole thing?"

"NO. I was crying so fucking hard, I put it down. What a horrible fucking book."

"Freakin_Geek....... A fairy comes along and turns his stuffed rabbit into a real rabbit and it hopped away."

I stared blankly at her. "What...?"

"Freakin_Geek, what other books have you stopped reading?"

I actually like his version better. I always hated Holden Caulfield. If his parents had killed Allie, I think the book would've been so much better. More than just something for angsty teenagers to relate to.

The first time I read The Two Towers I misread the part where Treebeard was explaining the weaknesses of the Ents. Somehow I read it as things they are resistant to so I thought they were super OP tree giants immune to fire like that stone tree Pokemon. Second time I read it they weren't so OP :/

When I read the last Harry Potter book, during the Battle of Hogwarts, I was camping and excited/anxious to get to the end, so I was rushing a little and accidentally skipped the page where Fred died. Percy came back, there was an explosion, and then Harry had to go find Voldy and Snape. So I was shocked when Harry goes into the Great Hall and the Weasleys are all crying over Fred's body, and annoyed. Like really, JKR killed a WEASLEY off-screen??? It just seemed like such an amateur thing to do.

Luckily I reread it pretty soon after, and no pages stuck together that time. Heh.

I think I skipped a couple critical pages in my life because my memory is just like schizophrenic Holden's.

Holy hell. I wish I could have that kind of accident with a book. That sounds like an amazing experience.

Back in the 90s my dad rented Braveheart. At the time it came on 2 vhs tapes. Well, he accidentally watched the 2nd tape first. He finally realized his mistake when Mel Gibson died and he couldn't fathom how there was still another hour and a half left in the movie

Now I want to find this book at my local libraries and glue those pages together....

Something similar happened to me with Crime and Punishment. I had no real idea what the book was really about, and I accidentally skipped the chapter where he murders the people. So he's just kind of freaking out about something he did and I had no clue what was going on. Thinking he must be going insane or something.

You know, one could still make the argument that Allie was murdered. Holden's an unreliable narrator with obvious mental instabilities, remember? Perhaps the only way he could cope with Allie's death was by convincing himself that he died of illness. Mentally altering events as a way to cope with grief is a pretty common trope in fiction, if not real life.

Yeah, a similar thing happened to me when reading The Sun Also Rises. I bought a used copy on Amazon, and it had huge portions clipped out of it, like some dumbass kid was too lazy to re-type the bits for a school project or something.

Basically, I missed a lot of things. Like the main character's impotence. That sets the stage for the tension with his love interest for the whole book, and here I was thinking she was just some aloof asshole who couldn't be tied down.

But yeah, he couldn't get it up.

Reminds me of the story someone told of missing the opening scene of the movie Predator and being shocked when the badass soldiers in the jungle got torn apart by an alien.

I've only just started reading the book and I really want to read this comment but I know I shouldn't until I finish the book.

I had a similar although less dramatic experience with Blood and Iron. The book has a ton of references to Tam Lin strewn throughout it, and the characters have a habit of talking in circles around things instead of saying them outright.

I spent my entire first read confused about the relationships between half the characters because they'd be implied through questions like, "Is he going to wait for you at the crossroads?" which at the time didn't mean much to me, but if you know Tam Lin, is a pretty clear reference to the two characters being lovers.

This is why I have an automatic habit of checking the page number every time I turn the page. It really bothers me when I read a manga that doesn't have page numbers.

I watched Breakfast at Tiffany's, having previously seen the Seinfeld episode about it. I was waiting the whole movie for the twist where Fred was revealed as gay.

My parents told me they watched Edge of Tomorrow at the movie theatre. I asked my dad what he thought of it, and he said, "Eh, it seemed like a typical Tom Cruise movie where there's lots of explosions, he beats the aliens, and saves the day. There wasn't any tension to it."

It turns out they only watched the last half of it because they walked in after their original movie had ended. They managed to miss the whole premise of the movie.

I’m a little late to this party, but I had a very very similar experience with Gone Girl. I messed up opening the book on my kindle and basically started two thirds into the book. On the chapter where she comes home and he’s leans into her ear and says “you bitch” or something like that. So I think this whole story is being told from the perspective of the two of them talking in the shower and then later him talking to the detective. There’s like zero character development, so I’m basically trying to figure out who these people are and actually enjoying that they aren’t spoon feeding me anything. Likewise, there’s like zero plot development, they just say things like “well what about the shed”, “what about the purse” with no explanation. Seeing as this is a mystery book this all seems pretty normal and I’m getting really excited for a big reveal at the end tying all these little pieces together…and then it just ends….

It actually would have made a pretty good short story with a slightly better ending. I tried to re-read it from the beginning, gave up after like 20 minutes of being upset and just watched the movie instead.

Then, I read the title of this reddit post. From its wording, I expected that OP was reading a compilation of high-school curriculum novels, and when he approached the end of Catcher in the Rye, turned two pages at the most important part of the book- the part where the book ends(!)- and then unwittingly proceeds to read an entirely different book (literally).

My daughter's friend read a different version of A Christmas Carol after misunderstanding what the references to Scrooge's dead partner Marley meant.

I imagine this made the book a more poignant and tragic read.

i dont even remember the parts about holdens little bro dieing , just that he had a gross roomate

In watching LOST, I missed the episode that revealed that the resurrected Locke was actually the Man in Black.

I thought it really was Locke, with some newfound confidence and connection to the island after coming back to life.

It wasn't until years later when I posted in /r/lost talking about the weird change in his character and how his change didn't seem to fit the ready of the tone and themes of the series.

So I saw the final battle as between Jack and Locke: reason vs faith, rather than light vs dark.

This reminds me of when I rented the Orphanage by Guillermo del Toro. Except i thought it was Orphan with the creepy little girl.

So here I am waiting for the little girl to appear and the movie to become all wacky or whatever. Sorrow, misery, anguish, confusion and the movie ended. I felt so hollow. That's the wrong movie to expect a wacky lighthearted scary movie from.

The post is three hours old, a comment here is 2 hours old. It only takes an hour to get to the front page of /r/bestof?

Edit: holy fuck! -56 karma for what is possibly my least offensive comment ever! New milestone reddit!

Edit 2: I'm riding this karma train straight into hell.