IMHO seems to me the most appropriate forum for this post: mods, please move if that felt appropriate.
I recently bought a copy of Bill Bryson’s latest book – a kind of sequel twenty years on, to his account of a tour around Britain, * Notes From a Small Island*: this new work titled * The Road to Little Dribbling * (ghastly title IMO). Essentially, more travels by Bill, around parts of Britain new to him. My verdict was: some interesting and worthwhile patches, but also a lot of Bryson’s standard, and IMO tediously oft-repeated and fairly lame, “shtick”. I knew that with my purchase, I was taking a risk – find that his books vary considerably in quality.
Incidences also, of another oft-encountered Bryson failing: wrong and erroneous “facts”. He happened to give a fair amount of attention to a hobby-type interest of mine, about which I consider myself reasonably well-informed: his writings on which contained several for-sure factual errors – on smallish points, but no less annoying to me for that.
Feeling rather irate about the informational sloppiness – I considered that I would be wasting my time writing complaints to Mr. B., care of his publisher; chose instead to vent my sentiments by posting about the matter, on a message board which I frequent, which is dedicated to the hobby concerned. I was a little surprised to get several responses politely disagreeing with me, and expressing the basic sentiment that Bryson is a travel writer and humorist, with no claim to being a scholar about the relevant subject, and no obligation to get his info about it meticulously right; these posters stated that they would not have been very perturbed to read this travel book by Bryson and come across this wrong info – notwithstanding that they’d instantly recognise it as wrong.
The Straight Dope’s declared mission, as we know well, is “fighting ignorance”. I would imagine that anyway the large majority of Dopers would strongly disagree with the consensus summarised above: that, with me, they’d feel with some passion, that if one is writing non-fiction – even light and humorous non-fiction – one should do one’s damnedest to get the information purveyed in it, right; and that spreading misinformation, even about arcane and trivial stuff, is BAD. The several independent dissentient voices told of above (from posters who seemed essentially intelligent and articulate), are causing me to wonder a little, whether these folk are actually onto something – whether the likes of us might sometimes be too “precious” about the perceived sacredness of correct info in even the smallest of things; whether we should basically be cool with the disregarding of accuracy about such minutiae, in the greater cause of a “fun” and arresting, and after all lightweight, read. Any thoughts on this, would be received with interest.