There’s only one time so far in my life when I’ve torn pages out from a book. It was a fit of pique, an unreasonable response to an unreadable, unreliable and bizarre decision. It was the introduction to the abridged and edited version of Finnegan’s Wake by Anthony Burgess. It was a glib, unnecessary, and as I remember, idiosyncratic read. Burgess “edited” the Wake, which makes as much sense as cutting out pieces of the Mona Lisa or halving the run time of Beethoven’s Fifth. Pick your analogy, it didn’t make sense, and while I had read the Wake 1.5 times before that — not counting the genuine times I had skimmed or attempted and failed to complete the book — I still couldn’t reason the logic of some of his edits.