I'm encountering the crashing on my Kobo Touch, too. It's running 1.9.17 (r37603, 3/16/12), and it has an ADATA 32gb SDHC card in it. I can only read one page until it returns to the home screen.
The funny thing is that it can still read books on the SD card with no problem. It's only the books in the main memory that seem to have the issue.
