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Booking through Thursday

Today's question on Booking Through Thursday is "What’s the worst thing you ever did to your reading material?"

It’s time for summer reading, so … today’s question? What’s the worst thing you ever did to your reading material? Sand in the bindings from the beach? Dropped into the pool? Covers smeared with sunscreen?
And, if you’ve never done actual summer-time damage … have you EVER damaged your book/magazine/paper? Dropped it in the bathtub? Used it to kill a bug? Spilled with coffee?

The worst thing I have accidentally done to a book was spill tea all over it. I may also have crushed an insect or two between pages and left food-stains inside books.

I have, however, deliberately done worse things to books.
I have:
  • hollowed them out to make hiding places. To be fair to myself, these were books I bought second hand and started reading, only to discover that there were pages missing. I do have one Reader's Digest book ready for hollowing and I don't feel bad about it at all - it is, after all, a volume of digested, i.e. edited books, and in my opinion that is one of the worst things you can do to a good book (don't, however, get me started on bloated monstrosities like The Historian - that I would gladly edit and it would be better for it).
  • given them to my pet parrots to shred (one book with missing pages and one terrible, terrible book that made me mad because of homophobic elements)
  • put them in the recycling bin 
In my opinion, the very worst thing you can do to a book is to leave it unread. If you can not or will not read a book you have in your possession, give someone else a chance to read it. It's disrespectful to the author, the publisher and not least the trees that gave their lives for the paper to not give a book a chance to be read. This may be why I love second hand books so much. I know most of them have already been read at least once and so I don't feel too guilty about leaving them in my TBR stack for years on end.
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Comments

gautami tripathy said…
I will hollow out the tomes I hate and no one wants!

Thanks for putting that thought in my mind!

Here is my BTT post
June 27, 2013 11:41 am
Laurel-Rain Snow said…
I have never hollowed out a book...but in the case you describe, it seemed appropriate.

Hollowing a book reminds me of those mystery novels where a treasure is found in the hollowed space.

Here's MY BTT POST
June 27, 2013 1:16 pm
Unknown said…
I've never hollowed out a book but I sure would love to try that one day (when I find the book to do it to). And I'm guilty for unread books.


Andrea K. @ Books and Bindings
Booking Through Thursday
June 27, 2013 1:31 pm
Hazel said…
We have the same reason for loving second hand book so much.

Hazel
June 27, 2013 3:00 pm
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