I got The Radetzky March–of which book you can google predictable things for yourself.
I got it from the library which the Bank of the Republic, our semi-private central bank here, runs. They have rather old-fashioned views of things, as do many things pertaining to the book business in these regions. So when they buy a paperback they do what people used to do when they bought a paperback: they get it bound.
The problem seems to be the binders are no longer old-fashioned. The result is merely durable; and the binding occasionally infringes on the central portions of text (the stitching, you see) with rather annoying results. The effect can be, as you will understand, discouraging.
Another thing is that I can’t help wishing I were reading it in English. One learns things by translating the expressions one finds in the Spanish translation back into English, and I doubt the original was in English, but the thing is that those expressions take on a lot more life in English.
On that last point, I sometimes wonder if it is just me–the third discouragement, if you will.
