Complete and Unabridged

I've been reading "Vanity Fair" for several weeks now, on and off, and am getting towards the end. Indeed, I hit the three-quarters mark at the weekend, and was looking forward to powering through the last 170 or so pages over the first few days of this week.

Yesterday, I had particularly set myself the target of reaching page 572, thus leaving exactly 100 pages to go. So, I looked forward to around that point to determine where exactly the chapter break fell so that I knew where I was going to...

Imagine my horror, then, when I discovered that my copy jumped from page 531 to page 582! It then had a block of 50ish pages and then jumped back to page 582!

Luckily, it being an old book the text is available online, and so I was able to track down and read the missing chapters that way, and as a consequence I read right across the 'gap' and so am that bit closer to the end. Still, it was a traumatic ordeal.

(I'm not absolutely convinced that the text I found online was itself complete and unabridged, as the hardcopy does at least claim. But at this point I'm not too bothered - even if incomplete it was enough for me to feel no need to go back and check.)