There's one thing about reading that can really frost my cookies: when I'm trying to enjoy a story and come across a giant, blundering error that someone SHOULD have caught somewhere along the editing process. I'm not talking typos, because those I can kind of understand, but a general fact that is obviously wrong, especially when it's coming from a character in the story who should know better. This can make me put down a book--no matter how good it is. It can also make me spend the next three hundred pages looking for more errors as I read, which is not what I originally wanted to do when I sat down to enjoy a novel.
So what brings about this little rant? I have been reading an adult book, by a very famous author who has had his movies made into several movies, and is extremely popular. And within the first hundred pages I've found several blatant errors. Sometimes I can brush these aside and not let them bug me too much, but these were statements by the main character who's supposed to make his living studying the things he's now erroneously reporting. And it annoys me. Really bad.
Now I'm not trying to say that every author has to be perfect in every fact they include in their books--authors are humans, too. But there are fact-checkers for a reason, and I do think that the big, glaring errors should be addressed. Because there are very anal readers out there who are going to get annoyed :) And write blog posts about it. And generally just spend the rest of the book picking apart every last detail, and enjoy pointing fingers and giggling.
So is it possible to not get frustrated by these little errors? How do other people get around them? I know I read a lot of paranormal and F/SF because the world building allows me to overlook little flaws :)
______________________________
No comments:
Post a Comment
I adore comments--let me know what you are thinking!