That time I read the whole book upside down at book club

I show up to my monthly book club at Barnes and Noble last Tuesday, ready to talk about this new thriller everyone loved. I had spent three weeks reading it, taking notes, even folding down pages. Then Mary starts talking about the main character's pet cat, and I said, wait, I thought it was a dog? She looks at me funny and says no, the author describes the cat in chapter two. That's when I realized I had been reading the book upside down the whole time. No joke, I had the cover facing me but the pages were oriented wrong, and I just never flipped it around because I was reading in bed with bad lighting. Now I have to reread the whole thing, and I feel like an idiot. Has anyone else ever done this dumb with a book?

3 comments

3 Comments

kellygrant5d ago

Okay but hold on... I'm gonna play devil's advocate here. You said you "read the whole book upside down" but did you really? I mean you still processed the words, you still followed the plot, you just had the physical book flipped wrong. The story is the story regardless of which way you hold the paper. Honestly I think you might have picked up on more than you realize because you were forced to focus on the actual text instead of getting distracted by page numbers or formatting. You probably got a purer reading experience than the rest of us who are too hung up on how a book is supposed to look. Maybe that little cat vs dog mix up is just a normal misread that happens to anyone and you're blaming the upside down thing too hard.

young.thomas5d ago

Plan B is way more fun. You get the story plus the bonus challenge of decoding everything. It honestly sounds like a better way to read if you ask me.

singh.harper5d ago

Huh, Kelly's actually got a point there. I mean, think about it - if you were reading the words upside down and still following the plot, that's some serious decoding your brain was doing. You basically read the whole thing in a code that only you knew the key to. The dog and cat mix up is probably just a regular brain fart, not a sign you messed up the whole experience. Honestly, I'd keep the upside down read as the canon version of the story for yourself.