I checked out some library books via Overdrive, one of them The Killing Game by Nancy Bush. Somewhat entertaining murder mystery, but I’m about to toss it.
The heroine, Andi, shows up at the office of the retired-police-detective-turned-private-investigator. Lucas notes she’s wearing tan pants.
Not two paragraphs later, she’s smoothing down her skirt as she sits in the chair. :smack:
I know errors creep up. I know authors make mistakes in research. I get that. But continuity errors in books bug me. I also gave up on a book once because the character said of her work, “It’s very varied.” No one says that. It sounds stupid and reads worse.
I want to be immersed in the story. I want to swallow the plot and be carried away on the adventure/romance/mystery. I’m not going to double check the author’s facts. But don’t have such a glaring error it brings me to a screeching halt and sours me on the story.
In one of Roger Zelazny’s “Amber” novels, there is an extended dialogue, with unattributed speech. One guy says something, then the other guy, then the first, then the second…
When you get to the end, you find he’s dropped a stitch somewhere, and, at some point in there, the speakers got reversed. i.e., you’d expect every odd utterance to be the first guy, and every even utterance the second guy. But when you get to the seventeenth utterance…it’s the second guy.
Zelazny’s dialogue, in those novels, is so short on details, it’s almost impossible to figure out where the mistake happened, but it sure brings me up short with a shock when I get to the end of that dialogue block and realize I thought the other guy was talking.
Any mistake with weaponry pulls me right out of a book. Especially those that could have been caught with, oh…I don’t know…5 minutes research. Or pre-intrawebs, a quick call to the police department or the local librarian. Walter Wager wrote a series of action novels where the heroine carried a .357, and kept checking the clip before action. This was well before Coonan even existed.
I’m not too concerned with factual errors, but typographical errors really bug me. If I notice more than one I get the impression the book is cheap shit that no one bothered to proof and more often than not I will put it down and not pick it up again.
I once picked up a xenofiction book called A Rustle In The Grass, from the point of view of an ant. First sentence, establishes that the MC is a worker ant. Second sentence, uses a male pronoun for said worker.
I figured that if they didn’t know all workers are female, they had no business writing a story about ants. I put the book down.
Just got through reading a novel about the plucky heroine who goes through trials and tribulations and at the end has to fight the Big Bad barehanded. Everything up to that point has been reasonably good.
Then the author goes into explicit detail about how PH needs to palmheel BB’s nose in order to drive the pointy bone behind it into the brain and kill him. I had to read that passage to SWMBO so she could laugh at it, too.
Agree heartily! “The Martian” playing fast and loose with microbiology drove me crazy.
I too get cross at errors in published books. Once MaxTheVool and I were listening to a rather silly audiobook. A character’s camel turned into a donkey for one line. Somebody’s Find and Replace failed them…?
Lots of crappy fantasy books have errors around horsemanship.
In Lois Lowry’s The Giver, the society as described is at well below a replacement birthrate. Yeah, I know, you have to be pretty nerdy to even care about that, but in some ways it’s even worse than a simple continuity error like the OP described: There, you know right away that it’s an error, but for the entire rest of the book, I kept on expecting there to be some explanation for the population imbalance: Are people coming in from other societies? Is the society’s history short enough that they just haven’t finished dwindling away yet? But it never is explained.
George R.R. Martin wrote a vampire novel, Fevre Dream. Overall, it’s a great book and I recommend it. But there was one scene where one of the vampire characters compared himself to Dracula.
The problem with that is the novel is set in 1857. Nobody would have thought of Dracula as a vampire in 1857. Nobody other than a medieval historian would have even recognized the name Dracula. Prince Vlad Dracula was an obscure fifteenth century Wallachian warlord until Bram Stoker appropriated his name for his 1897 novel.
In 1857, a vampire would have compared himself to Sir Francis Varney or Lord Ruthven.
I got jarred out of a John Ringo book (one of the Black Tide Rising series) when one of the characters claimed more than 8000 hours in combat. The timeline for the actions in the series to this point was quite firmly established at 9 months to at the very outside 11 months.
I know that full time employment - 8 hours day / 5 days a week / 50 weeks a year is 2000 hours.
Okay double that: 16 hours a day in the zone whacking zombies, 8 hours to sleep, eat, and everything else and just pass out on weekends: 4000 hours. (I’m told that newbie lawyers are often told they need to work 2000 billable hours a year, and the ratio is typically 2 hours actually worked for each billed hour - nope, not going to be a lawyer).
Alright, who needs to sleep at all during the week, there be zombies to kill - 6000 hours.
How about no rest at all, no time for transportation, eating, peeing, showering, etc. 24x365 = 8760 hours. But wait, this is only 9 or at most 11 months which is a total of 6570 - 8030 hours. The character is also very clear as to what constitutes combat - active hostilities, not just being in a zombie apocalypse. Either she is exaggerating (in a self confident but not a self aggrandising character) or the author didn’t bother to work the numbers.
The last Tom Clancy Book I read, he contradicted himself by stating that the bad guy had done everything right computer security wise and there was no data that the good guys could recover and use and later mentioned that the bad guys had screwed up and left a vital piece of information available when they recovered the computer system (to be clear, this was referring to the same incident). He also had a timing issue where a character was killed but the timeline later mentioned misaligns by a couple of days. He really needed an editor at that point.
The second Nick Stone book,Crisis Four (by Andy McNab) has our tough guy soldier/ hero get circumcised. Just in case he’s caught during a mission. He can pass himself off as an Israeli agent.
This was done three weeks before the mission.
Uh, do you think a freshly healed incision will fool anyone? Jews are circumcised as baby’s. Brit Milah is on the 8th day.
I like the Nick Stone series. Sometimes it requires suspending logical thought.
Reading The Magicians by Lev Grossman, at one point early in the narrative he has his young protagonist at magical boarding school like to go and sit alone in a tower observatory late at night because it’s nice and warm and quiet. Thing is, observatories with optical telescopes are bloody freezing at night, both so the telescope can stick out and because warm air would cause air currents which could distort the view through the telescope.
I think it was an Elmore Leonard book. Two “streetwise” characters were in a cafe, and were giving a waitress a lot of grief. I thought: that seems dumb- they must like eating saliva.
This. I’m not a firearms expert, but I do know the difference between a clip and a magazine, that “silencers” are not normally used with revolvers, and that the AR-15 is a civilian version.
I also have a lot of experience with fire protection and intrusion detection systems, so the errors made regarding either of them are quite irritating. (In movies, it’s either the guy wiggling a knife blade in a magnetic stripe reader to open the cell door or the heroine setting off one fire sprinkler head and seeing every sprinkler in the building go off.)
When reading, I will often turn to my wife and say, “All this author/publisher had to do was let some reasonably well-informed person read his manuscript to check for major errors. It’s a fail.”
I have a side gig as a proofreader for a publishing company. Mostly I catch typesetting and continuity issues. Trinopus pointed out a common one–the dialog quotes get messed up and one typeset line or paragraph has two people talking. That shifts everything and you can easily get lost in a rapid-fire back-and-forth exchange.
I see “the dreaded name switch” way more often than you would think. A character “Carol” suddenly become “Claire” for 1 page, then back to “Carol.”
A husband in LA calls his family on the East Coast one evening, but is worried he’ll miss his kids, them being in school and all since it’s 3 hours earlier there.
In the prologue, the little boy is “climbing out of his crib” and his older sister is 7; however, in the story proper the boy is now 4 and this same sister is a sullen teenager.
I catch a lot of factual errors; many of them regarding weaponry (as **silenus **pointed out). In one story, the character had a “Mossfinder” shotgun, and the author mixed up a Ruger model with a Colt. Stuff like that.
Sometimes, however, I comment on the logic of the scene. For example, I just edited a story where, on bright sunny afternoon, the protagonist looked through the sliding glass door of a residence while standing in the yard and saw something deep inside the house. But given the circumstances, the glass would have been reflective and it would have been difficult if not impossible to see inside, unless it was lit up like the proverbial Christmas tree.
College football games played in April.
A toad is now a reptile, and an alligator is an amphibian.
I read a novel a few years back in which a society is described as having a stable population, with each woman having only one child. Furthermore, although no one has any siblings, and no one knows who one’s father is, people still refer to other characters as being a cousin. The sequel tried to patch this hole, but not convincingly…
I was distracted by a sequence in one of Lee Child’s Reacher novels, in which the hero is supposed to be surveilling a suspect traveling on I-95 in Maine. To avoid detection, Reacher parallels his vehicle by driving on Route 1.
As the speed limit on I-95 is 65-70 mph in Maine and you can average about 30 mph on Route 1 (when not stopped at the frequent lights), this struck me as highly ludicrous.
Child frequently has only a dim knowledge of American climate and topography, which makes for :smack: moments in some of his other books.
