Book Errors That Pull You Out of the Story

[Melbourne]

@CairoCarol

I recently read The Nix by Nathan Hill and loved, loved, loved it. With one exception - there are repeated references to “moving to Jakarta” to work as a teacher in an international school, where (so the character says) you’ll get a big fat salary and a car and driver.

Teachers at prestigious international schools here make a decent salary, but they are hardly raking it in hand over fist.

But they used to do much better, right? I haven’t read the book, but if I did read that, I would only think that he was sadly out of touch with current wage rates.

In the 80’s (when I was younger) it was still possible to live very well as an English teacher in just mid-level schools in some parts of Asia:

[Melbourne]

@ioioio

I like to think of reading novels as somewhat educational. I should be able to believe the facts that frame the story. Occasionally, however, I get jolted out of stories that occur in places I’m familiar with (say, having lived there).

[…]
And there’s no landscape there that matches the author’s description.

You know those scenes in the movies where you scan across a vast range of mountains before or after focusing on the hero? Often on a completely different continent? Clue folks: The Rockies look /nothing like/ the Alps.

[Melbourne]

@Little_Nemo

I’m thinking the bigger error that Andy was pointing out is the author saying this society would have a stable population. If every women has only one child, each generation is going to be half the size of the previous one.

All girls. Just a few blokes each generation…

[Chronos]

Quoth Poysyn:

I was pissed that the author expected the reader to believe that no one in the book had heard about poaching of bears for their gall bladders.

I didn’t know that bear gall bladders were a valued commodity, and I still had no trouble imagining why bears might be poached. On the one hand, you’ve got people who think they’re dangerous and so kill them to protect their livestock/children/selves, and on the other hand, you’ve got people who think that hunting them is macho and makes for manly stories/trophies.

[DrFidelius]

And bear is tasty, especially during berry season.

[constanze]

@Chronos

I didn’t know that bear gall bladders were a valued commodity, and I still had no trouble imagining why bears might be poached.

While I’ve heard several times of a special bear species being held in capitivity in China under cruel conditions (tiny cages, a steel tube inside their body opening to the outside) to harvest gall bladder fluid for use in superstitiotus medicine, I have not heard of poaching bears for that purpose in America.

[Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor]

A Sherlock Holmes pastiche, that babbles about an 1885 newspaper article about a Loch Ness monster sighting.
In 1885?
That silliness is a 20th Century vintage rubbish.

[Sangahyando]

@Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor

A Sherlock Holmes pastiche, that babbles about an 1885 newspaper article about a Loch Ness monster sighting.
In 1885?
That silliness is a 20th Century vintage rubbish.

I seem to recall something about Saint Columba, a millennium or more earlier, having a set-to with the LNM… back-up no doubt findable if desired…

[Poysyn]

@StarvingButStrong

Wanna hear worse? On first reading your second sentence above, all I was thinking was, where do you find a pot big enough to poach a bear??

Thanks for that!

[LH75]

As my friend ZonexandScout said:

or the heroine setting off one fire sprinkler head and seeing every sprinkler in the building go off.)

There are applications for open head deluge fire sprinklers, but occupied spaces such as apartment buildings, schools and office buildings are not among them.

In almost forty years of working on fire alarms, often monitoring sprinkler systems, this always jars me.

[wonky]

I was reading a book with two main female characters. About a third of the way in, the characters switched names. About two thirds of the way in, they switched back.

An SF novel, I don’t remember which one, said the moon was 40 miles away from the earth. I didn’t keep reading.

[Mr.Miskatonic]

In a non-fiction context:

I was reading a book on the Battle of Waterloo, one that professed to be quite a detailed and meticulous account (it was just the Mercer account, but never mind that). But about the start of the battle it states that Wellington couldn’t use his troops as aggressively as he had in Spain since these were untested soldiers and his veteran troops were over in America fighting in the American Revolution.

[Mk_VII]

Authors seldom have any input, or are even consulted, about book covers, particularly after the first edition. Often they hate it (Tolkein famously did about the US edition of Lord of the Rings) or think their idea was better. But in truth authors are usually better at writing than book marketing.

[Annoying_Buzz]

@PatrickLondon

I think the Da Vinci Code tried my patience pretty early, but I had to finish it for my book group. What really sunk it beyond repair, for me, was the ludicrous attempt at representing British academics (however stereotypically villainous, à la Hollywood) with one of them talking about a “safety school” in the context of university admission. Any halfway competent editor would have told him such a term doesn’t exist over here.

I’d enjoyed Angels and Demons, after which the Da Vinci Code seemed kind of flaccid (Digital Fortress was my 3rd and final Dan Brown book). What made me roll my eyes the most was the supposed expert on Da Vinci being baffled at what was obviously a mirror-written piece of text.

[Sangahyando]

@Mr.Miskatonic

In a non-fiction context:

I was reading a book on the Battle of Waterloo, one that professed to be quite a detailed and meticulous account (it was just the Mercer account, but never mind that). But about the start of the battle it states that Wellington couldn’t use his troops as aggressively as he had in Spain since these were untested soldiers and his veteran troops were over in America fighting in the American Revolution.

Could it be that the author (while still revealing himself as an idiot) was thinking about, but misidentifying, the War of 1812? – a good deal closer to Waterloo in date; though one takes it that the British participants would, by a comfortable margin, have been out of the US by 1815 !

[Gyrate]

@Sangahyando

Could it be that the author (while still revealing himself as an idiot) was thinking about, but misidentifying, the War of 1812? – a good deal closer to Waterloo in date; though one takes it that the British participants would, by a comfortable margin, have been out of the US by 1815 !

The War of 1812 concluded in early 1815, so there were certainly still British soldiers in the country at that point, and it was effectively an offshoot of the Napoleonic Wars. But it wasn’t the American Revolution (or War of American Independence, if you prefer), which is the problem.

[Alessan]

@Andy_L

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…

Dan Simmons’* Ilium/Olympos*? Bugged me too. Simmons is a smart guy, but he doesn’t always think things through. Doesn’t help that he pulled a Dennis Miller after 9/11.

[Darren_Garrison]

@constanze

While I’ve heard several times of a special bear species being held in capitivity in China under cruel conditions (tiny cages, a steel tube inside their body opening to the outside) to harvest gall bladder fluid for use in superstitiotus medicine, I have not heard of poaching bears for that purpose in America.

Poaching of bear gallbladders used in traditional medicine increases

[Andy_L]

@Alessan

Dan Simmons’* Ilium/Olympos*? Bugged me too. Simmons is a smart guy, but he doesn’t always think things through.

Yep.

[Mr.Miskatonic]

@Sangahyando

Could it be that the author (while still revealing himself as an idiot) was thinking about, but misidentifying, the War of 1812? – a good deal closer to Waterloo in date; though one takes it that the British participants would, by a comfortable margin, have been out of the US by 1815 !

(as Gyrate already pointed out) Yes, that is undoubtably what was meant, but the fact that this was alleged to be a work of research and they made such a boneheaded mistake just made me lose what little respect I had for them.