I knew there was something I was missing.
That was fantactic!
Or in The Lost Symbol, where the villain gets a “jug of Bunsen-burner fuel - a viscous highly flammable, yet noncombustible oil”.
I’m not going to read any more of his books. I get a headache trying to work out what it is he thinks he’s trying to describe, even when it’s something as mundane as a door.
I know. I had to reread it a few times.
Correction: Dale Brown. Not to be confused with the other lousy writer named Brown.
In one of Simon Hawke’s Time War books, a (time traveling) character complains about the inaccuracy of the media talking about the Chernobyl reactor “burning”, and says it’s probably a matter of scientifically uneducated reporters using burning as an analogy for fission. Except - in reality, the media referred to the Chernobyl reactor as burning because it did burn; one of its many problems was that it used a moderator made of flammable graphite. Link:
But did you have ripe strawberries and ripe watermelons at the same time? In the book, the characters are cutting up ripe strawberries and watermelon they just bought at the local farmer’s market. In NE Ohio, the strawberries are long gone by the time watermelons come in.
ETA:What MLS said. 
Making Money
One thing that’s always annoyed and mildly amused me is the tendency of certain female authors (and it’s only female authors who do this) to refer to a character’s genitals, regardless of gender, as “their sex”. For example; “He pressed his hard sex against her soft sex and they had sex.”
The clue for
Sophia
was pretty obvious, at least it should have been for half the people in the book.
Timiothy Zahn in his original Thrawn trilogy had every situation going to hell in a few heartbeats. Especially noticable in the abridged audiobook versions.
He also wrote a series (Conquerors IIRC) in which his alien species’ heart was named a ‘hunn’. So lots of situations went to hell in a ‘hunn beat’ :rolleyes:
I used to be a bit of a Tom Clancy fan until I read the first of the Op Centre books that had an F-117 stealth fighter launching and recovering from an aircraft carrier. :dubious:
I know Clancy just had his name on it rather than writing it himself but having something that badly wrong get to publication under his name was a red-flag for the future and it was the last book of his of any kind I read.
Technical errors, like others have said—part of the curse of being a nerd, I guess. It can range anywhere from amusingly annoying to “incisors scraping on a chalkboard” level.
I mean, little “oopses” here and there, I can overlook or laugh off. But it’s when the errors make up major elements of the plot that get me.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s the nitpicker in me that’s more affronted, or the artist. Am I being pedantic about things that I specialize in, but that are secondary to “the big picture”…or am I just noticing that the author is so focused in their big story that they didn’t bother building a world to support it—or even if anything could support it?
And, of course, this depends on the type of work the fiction is. Anything that fancies itself as halfway “serious” is going to get less slack than, say, “Chainsaw Maid V: The Flamesawening!”
In the beginning of Jurassic Park, there’s a couple throwaway characters who you never see again. One of them thinks about how crazy it is for the other - his wife - to be worried about her looks since she “was homecoming queen at Rice University.”
(Then their baby is eaten by din[g]os and they’re never heard from again.)
Anyway, the problem there is Rice’s approach to electing Homecoming Queens:
On a similar vein (but possibly less minor), Shyalaman’s Signs drove me absolutely nuts trying to figure out what variety of priest/pastor/minister Mel Gibson was supposed to be. Was he Catholic? Then why was he married? Was he protestant? Then why does the chick in the shop ask him to hear her confession? (Though they never actually call it confession, but that’s clearly what it is.)
It’s the mundanities that take me out of a story, details added for flavor (or padding), rather than the big stuff.
Like a teenage boy wearing pajamas to bed in summer, then getting out of bed when he hears a noise and putting on his slippers. Pajamas in summer? Slippers just to walk to a window? Then he sits on the sill of the window – he bends down so his butt is on the sill, and the window is on the first floor. He swings his legs over and is frightened by the drop to the ground. The window is low on the inside – how high can it be on the outside?
It would have been better if the author had said ‘Jimmy climbed out the window’.
Forgetting how old their characters are.
I recently read a novel set in 1935 in which a character, the mother of another major character, is said to be in her early 60s. She’s much older than any of the other characters, clearly of another generation. Later, her story is given in detail. She married her husband when she was 19, just before he went off to the war, meaning WWI, and gave birth to her daughter the next year. The daughter is on her third marriage, BTW. The book is set in America, not England.
I spent a long time trying to make any of that work. It can’t. It doesn’t really make any difference to the plot what year she got married, just that she had a daughter, but why make up a backstory that’s clearly impossible? How could any editor let that through?
That’s the worst example I’ve ever encountered, but if you’re the type to work this stuff out - especially in mysteries where the details could be critical - you’ll see it everywhere.
Lots of books irritate me - getting details that can be relatively easily looked up in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica will definitely do it. [No idea why, but I think the 1911 EB was the gold standard of encyclopedias or something, it seems like every library had one and many homes I visited had one. Go figure.]
Books where modern sensibilities are plunked down in people of Ancient Rome, or Medieval England. Believe me, very few people in Imperial Rome would consider 14 years old an unsuitable age for marriage [or sex] - old enough to bleed, old enough to breed. A 14 year old boy was old enough to have been apprenticed for anywhere from 5 to 9 years in much of medieval europe - prolonged childhood is a modern concept.
Can I add craptastic copyediting? Grammer and spelling errors that should be picked up by competent copyeditors, or where the writer needed to be whacked with a brick and reminded that there are rules of spelling and grammer and everybody should be copyedited.
Did you do that on purpose? Tell me you did that on purpose.
British English? First floor means second floor.
Extremely small sense of scale. For example in Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire, the right-hand man of Grand Admiral Thrawn is the captain of his flagship-way above dozens of other ranks. Or in the Hunger Games trilogy, the Districts are little more then city-size despite there being only thirteen of them to constitute a whole nation covering North America.