Book 1- in the introduction on page 6 starts the second paragraph:
“The last three chapters, set in November and December, depict the wars transformation of war and of the societies seen earlier in peace”.
The next paragraph starts:
“The last three chapters, set in November and December, depict the wars transformation of war and of the societies seen earlier in peace”.
Hmmmm. The second para ends "Toward that end, the text features work by famous artists such as Otto Dix… The art may help readers feel the horror and sorrow of what George F. Keenan called “the greatest seminal catastrophe of the twentieth century”
Next page the final para ends "Toward that end, the text features work by famous artists such as Otto Dix… The art may help readers feel the horror and sorrow of what George F. Keenan called “the greatest seminal catastrophe of the twentieth century”
What the hell- this will drive me crazy. Get out the next book.
All is going well. It is a book about spies in the Great War. An interesting read until they are talking of spies in Switzerland “The Prince de Hohenlohe, head of Nazi propaganda in Switzerland…”
I’m working my way thru Sue Grafton’s alphabet, and it did disturb me to find misspelled words in several of the volumes. One thing that really confused me, tho, was when one character’s car changed from a Porsche to a BMW then back to a Porsche without explanation, especially when it was the only mention of a BMW in the book. It pulled me out of the story as I flipped back to figure out where the Beemer came from.
There was a famous mix up in one of Agatha Christie’s books about one of the wives (from memory).
Also I recall in Neil Oliver’s “Not Forgotten” he was talking of the French destroyer “Verdun” which bought the body of the British Unknown Warrior from the continent back to the UK.
Verdun was the scene of an epic German and French confrontation but the destroyer was actually British. A pretty amateur mistake to make.
In an early edition of Steven King’s The Stand, he had various characters traveling west to Boulder, and then further west through the Rockies to Vegas on I-80. Except that I-80 doesn’t run through Colorado at all, it splits off and it’s I-70 that goes to Denver/Boulder and across the mountains. Bugged me the whole way through the book that nobody ever caught that, and did the author not ever once look at a map as he was plotting his book?
Many years hence and I’m now re-reading the later expanded edition of The Stand. The interstate issue has been corrected but there are quite a few inconsistencies that throw me off. The Judge leaves Boulder driving a Land Rover, but by the time he gets to California, it’s a Scout. Nick walks away from Stu and Ralph and they watch him go down a dark street, but in the next paragraph he’s back with them. The Free Zone has to bury all the bodies by Colorado’s “fall rainy season” in September - October, but if Colorado has a rainy season, it’s the July and August summer t-storms. And Mother Abigail is occasionally spelled Abagail.
Thanks for letting me vent. I’m enjoying the book again but these small things are irritating me.
I was reading The Big, Bad Book of Botany, and when the author repeated the “Rice makes birds’ stomachs explode” fallacy, I stopped right there and didn’t finish the book.
Mercy by David Lindsey. He’s a damn fine thriller writer and this is a very good novel but first time read it I got a few pages in and read, “It was like marrying Chang and Chen, the second of the two remaining invisible while you were dating the first, and then mercurially springing to life the morning after your wedding night while the one you had dated proceeded to disappear. The next night you made love to a man you’d never met.”
Stephen King had some complete howlers about automotive tech in Christine. And, of course, the first edition of Ringworld had earth turning the wrong way.
More recently, I was dismayed at the number of errors in Douglas Brinkley’s bio of Cronkite. Misused words, absurd sentences about “earning an honorary degree” and very specifically identifying the wrong model of warplanes used in Vietnam.
In 11-22-63 throughout the book the city of Killeen, Texas is consistently misspelled as “Kileen”. In addition, the protagonist keeps referring to how he can smell the oil production facilities in Midland, TX while in Dallas, even though the two cities are 330 miles apart!
In addition, one of the editions of his novella collection Full Dark, No Stars has a serious issue with a large chunk of the book being a reprint of an earlier section of the book - at least 30 pages, if not more - with the missing section being completely wiped out.
In “Eat, Pray, Love” she misidentifies the ruins at Prambanan as Buddhist. They aren’t. They’re Hindu. Either she misidentified Borabudur as Prambanan, or failed to notice a lack of Budhas at a Hindu site.
I’d have quit reading but it was the last part of the book so I didn’t.
I adore Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander books, but it has been a long time since anyone has bothered to proofread her, it seems.
In the most recent one, Ian is married in a breechclout and leggings. By the time he gets to the wedding night, he’s in breeches. I suppose he might have changed for the after-party, but really, a man who goes to his wedding in a breechclout is going to change clothes? I don’t think so.
There are many questions about where Jamie is getting his kilts in that book, too. He managed to show up in full Fraser dress tartan for that wedding, for example, in the middle of the Revolutionary War, not long after his house and everything in it have burned. Orly? And later he is wearing a plaid that is worn to transparency in places. Where did THAT come from, huh? He didn’t wear it when his house burned, so it isn’t that old. He’s been to Scotland in the meantime, where they were illegal, so he didn’t get it there. He’s been back for less than a year, so…
These are nitpicky things, but they bothered me. Gabaldon had always been so careful about explaining the gain and loss of clothes, previous to this book.
I read The Berrybender Narratives, by McMurtry a couple of years ago. It was a tedious slog of a novel, but the worst part for me was the distortion of history. Novels are fiction, but history is history. In this book one of his main characters was Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, the son of Sacajawea, and whose life is well documented. Not only did he have him die some 30 years before his actual death and in a place and manner that is completely at odds with history, but he had his father survive him, when his father died 20 years before him.
I love Dr. Paul Offit’s books about modern medicine and vaccinations. He’s very smart, and far be it from me to put down a guy who developed a vaccine for rotavirus, but in one of his books he references Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It’s sorely obvious that he has never read the book, but has only seen a couple of movies, and is picking his details about the “book” from assumptions he made based on the movies. Now, that’s nothing new, and I’ve seen that a lot in things like letters to the editor, and one painful Op-Ed column in the Chicago Tribune, but I expect more from the very intelligent Dr. Offit, who ought to know that Hollywood rarely sticks closely to the original material; at any rate, one of his editors should have read the book while getting her English degree, and pointed out the error.
I felt like (but didn’t) write a letter to him asking him correct the mistake, because I could imagine all kinds of ways anti-vaxxers could translate one single error into “Paul Offit knows nothing, and we can dismiss all of his work,” sort of the way Creationists try to toss out all science because of Piltdown.
This dovetails with the Brinkley errors, and others I’ve noted back to around 2000 or so: it’s almost certainly a spell-checking flaw, or a faulty search-and-replace version thereof. (Brinkley repeatedly uses “flare” for “flair” in the Cronkite book, which could be either.)
I think the reason these errors are getting worse is that too much of the process is left in the author’s hands, and since no one has to retype a manuscript any more, whatever goofy errors the writer made in Word or Pages or whatever remain in place, unseen by the increasingly superficial editing process.
Keyboard-to-bookshelf is bad enough for self-pub and small press. When major houses start releasing “bound manuscripts,” it’s a real devolution. Doubly so for nonfic and reference.
:smack:I misremembered, in Eat, Pray, Love, she visits the ruins at Borabudur and claims they are Hindu. (It’s covered with Buddha statues! ) so there is a chance she, in fact, went to the ruins at Prambanan, which are Hindu, and just got the names mixed up.
The problem is that publishers skimp on the copyediting these days.
Back in the pre-word-processor era, every publisher had copy editors, who would go through the manuscript line by line. Primarily, they were looking for typos, but a good copy editor would double check for consistency. Something like the BMW to Porsche would get a query (“In all other instances, his car was a Porsche. Now it’s a BMW. Is this correct?”). The copy editor would have reference books (an atlas, for instance, plus encyclopedias) by her side to double check locations and anything else.
But that’s expensive, and publishers are cutting corners. Since spell check eliminates the need to worry about spelling (but not grammar or just using the wrong word), there’s a thought that it’s not necessary. Thus, more errors creep in because no one is checking properly.
That’s probably not wrong, although a bit unclear. The Deutsche Arbeiterpartei formed in 1903 and changed its name to Deutsche Nationalsozialistische Arbeiterpartei in 1918, so I can certainly see how someone might conclude they followed Nazi ideology even then.
I was reading a history of Britain a couple of months back and it mentioned some American historical events in passing. The problem was it referred to John Adams and Sam Adams as being brothers and it referred to Grant beating Lee at Gettysburg. If there were obvious errors like this in regards to American history, how many similar errors had I missed that were made about British history?
I’m enjoying the book again but these small things are irritating me.