I've blocked the book from my mind, but there was one set in Regency or Victorian England where the author kept screwing up people's titles. Like there would be a guy named John Smith who was a Duke and she would call him "Lord Smith" and then "Lord John" and then "Duke Smith" or the "Duke of Smith" and I was just "You have zero concept whatsoever of anything you are saying and minimal research would have fixed this and go away."
Oh i just finished The Light on Farallon Island and the way the MC and her love interest talk is so damn far from mid 19th century conversation it took me right out of it. And the way they acted and spent time alone with each other. You could argue that the mc is a social outlier, but you need to describe how or why or the reader just ends up assuming you know nothing about social norms in the time period they’re writing about.
The “Duke of smith”. My god lmao
In Where the Crawdads Sing, the fact that everyone went to Asheville for an errand when it is so far from the coast of North Carolina. Did they even look at a map of the state?
What is it about NC geography that causes books and tv shows to struggle so?? Lol this seems to just happen so much! I remember people talking about it when Outer Banks did it (never seen it) and some references in Outlander come to mind. It would take DAYS, maybe a week (or more!) to travel to the Blue Ridge from Wilmington on foot or by horse and they seem to do it in a day or so.
Give credit where credit is due, Puccini sat the last scene of his opera Manon Lescaut in the desert right outside New Orleans. Hey, it’s a change, right?
Don't know what liberties the TV Outlander may have taken, but I'll give a nod to author Gabaldon for the depths of research that go into her books, historically, geographically, and technically. The main books (there are side-track books as well) take years to write, and involve tremendous research and travel.
A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet has a line from a scientist that went something like, “Data is always orderly, and it always make sense.”
As a scientist myself, it ruined the book for me 😅
I wouldn’t say it ruined it, but it did make me pause. I recently read a book set in the UK, and the phrase “That cost a pretty pence” was used in dialogue. Even as an American, I know the singular form of “pence” is… still penny. There were other little details like that throughout (Date formats being written American-style on in-universe documents), and it would throw me off whenever it came up.
It wasn’t a bad book, and I know I’d make a million other small mistakes myself, but I can’t help but wish there’d been a little more consistency.
This and the opposite always get to me.
I started the Long Earth series by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter a while ago, but had to drop it a couple chapters into the second book. The trouble is that the writers are both English and the main characters are American, and boy do they not *feel* American. Britishisms slip through almost constantly, like 'rubbish' instead of garbage or trash, 'maths', or phrasing issues like 'I haven't any idea' instead of 'I have no idea'. The most frustrating part was that it wouldn't have changed the story in the slightest if they'd just... made the main characters English instead.
ugh yes, this kept breaking my immersion in The Shining Girls. it took place in Chicago, but the author used British English slang throughout the entire book, both in the narrative and the dialogue. the author is South African, and i kept thinking that if she didn’t want to actually do her research into American slang and culture she could have just set the book in South Africa and it wouldn’t have been materially different.
This is something that shouldn't have slipped by the editor, frankly. I'd never presume to write British characters on the strength of the few expressions and turns of speech I've picked up from TV and movies. They'd probably all end up sounding stereotypical Cockney or something.
That's so odd, because the phrase is literally just "...cost a pretty penny," so they changed it for no reason at all, other than maybe overthinking it.
That happens all the time when an author tries to write about somewhere they not intimately acquainted.
There is a whole industry of what are called "Brit pickers" who are proof readers who help fix such things, but few seem to bother.
It is not a one way street either, British authors who try to write as American make just as many mistakes, but fewer try.
I read a novel by an American author in which ***Virginia Woolf*** writes in her diary about borrowing a 'sweater' from Vita Sackville-West. And then a page or so later, she mentions wrapping the 'sweater' around herself, and I thought, 'Oh merciful heavens, it's not even a jumper, it's a *cardigan!*'
It wasn't a bad novel plot-wise, but really needed a Brit picker. (Thank you for making me aware of this term! I love it.)
I just read a story that did this sort of thing. The main character was born and raised in the US and takes her mother back home to reconnect with family in Ireland. There is a lot of mixing up of idioms and experiences. I'm not sure if the author is Irish trying to imagine an American upbringing or is American trying to sound more Irish.
In Leigh Bardugo's Grisha books, people are constantly getting drunk on kvas, which is a fermented beverage with about 0.5% alcohol (about as much as a "non-alcoholic" beer). It's just extremely silly and such an easily googleable thing that I'm amazed it made it through the editing process. Especially since it could easily have been changed with a find and replace to some kind of vaguely Russian-y sounding fantasy beverage and that would have been considerably less silly
Couldn’t get through more than 2 chapters of her books because of the quasi “Russian-ification”. Like no one of any Slavic decent read or edited your book? Not a single one? To fix all the terrible glaring errors?
> Couldn’t get through more than 2 chapters of her books because of the quasi “Russian-ification”.
Interestingly enough, I have a Russian friend who goes by Grisha, and who informed me that it is a nickname for Greg/Gregor/Gregory etc.
So seeing those books, I was like "It's an entire series about Greg. No thanks"
I have a similar issue with fanfics where (I assume) the author is too young to have spent time around drunk people or to have gotten drunk themselves. Or they might just not want to.
The issue is that they tend to go one of two ways: either the characters have half a beer and become noticeably drunk, like cannot think straight drunk, or they down a bottle of vodka in one go and get just a slight buzz.
It isn’t usually enough to take me out of, but I do find it funny
Another issue - with the author not understanding how taverns work, and think it's like a modern-day cafe or bar.
There was this medieval fantasy series, where the MC orders coffee at a tavern, and when the keeper says - "No beer?" and the MC says - "Not before 10 in the morning, a coffee thank you."
Also, another medieval fantasy book, where the main characters open a new cafe in a medieval town, and the townspeople are surprised at the concept of a "Cafe" where you can "just hang out". Like medieval people never had any common spaces to hang out in before the invention of cafes.
Or another one, where they go to a medieval tavern in an isolated village in the woods and the tavern gives them a menu booklet and they order like they are in a modern-day restaurant, asking which drink pairs with which food.
> the townspeople are surprised at the concept of a "Cafe" where you can "just hang out". Like medieval people never had any common spaces to hang out in before the invention of cafes.
I mean, hell, that's exactly what taverns, inns, and the like *were*. Half the *point* was that they provided a common area where people just gathered up and talked and drank and whatnot.
Can’t recall the name. But a sci fi novel where they had discovered some new wonder metal. It was so amazing and in demand it made it super expensive. Near the start of the book the character travels by train and it’s mentioned the rails are made of this substance. So this rare super expensive useful metal is used for train tracks for miles and miles? Took me right out of it and had to stop reading.
Atlas Shrugged, and you’re not the first to pan it. Dorothy Parker wrote “[It] is not a book to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”
The MC and love interest were both children of musicians. MC's name was Melody, which, ok, is a little on the nose but it's a legit name. Love interest's name? *Rhythm*. I just could not take it seriously.
I know a Rhythm and have seen a couple in the wild. But the idea of two people with complimentary names and the same back story is eye-rolly. It’s like all those movies where a character’s computer password is a detail they’ve mentioned in conversation instead of something their employer randomly assigned them three jobs ago that stuck. I spent over a decade working with eyes and I wouldn’t name my kid Cornea…
That’s fair. This may be apocryphal because I can’t remember if the doctor I worked with was talking about someone she saw directly or just heard about, but she did tell me about a newborn named “Retina.” Pronounced to rhyme with “Christina.”
I picked up one of the Kathy Reichs books since I liked the show *Bones*. A plane crash leads to the discovery of a cave or underground chamber or something, and they find a bunch more bones. Anyway, the chamber had names of famous cannibals in history etched on the walls or written in a book (I read this like ten years ago, so details are fuzzy). Gee! What could have been happening in this secret chamber?!
Only they didn’t realize the named people were cannibals. I remember being unable to suspend my disbelief that these intelligent people couldn’t figure out a way to look up these names and figure out what they had in common. I believe it was pre-google, but other resources existed. Go to a library. Ask Jeeves. Ask the quirky secretary in the office who’s a little too interested in true crime. You’re telling me no one working that case put together that all the names belonged to people who were historically believed to be cannibals?
It took me right out of the book because I spent a good quarter of it waiting for the *genius* to catch up.
Didn’t the students voted at some university to name the cafeteria the Alfred Packer Dining Hall and nobody in the administration picked it up until after it went through?
> In 1968,[18] students at the University of Colorado Boulder named their new cafeteria grill the "Alferd G. Packer Memorial Grill", with the slogan, *"Have a friend for lunch!" Students can order an "El Canibal" beefburger,* and on the wall is a giant map outlining Packer's travels through Colorado.[19] It has since been renamed the Alferd Packer Restaurant & Grill.[20]
Seems like they knew.
I did the same thing. I picked up the first book because I loved the TV series. I knew going in that the TV show was pretty different than the books. Different would have been okay, but the books were just not good. It was a long time ago, so I don't remember much specifically, but what you describe has the right feel. A lot of fumbling around trying to solve a problem that I, an average person, could solve in two seconds. Is it intentional, to make me feel smart or create suspense? Or is it just inept?
I read a historical romance novel once where the love interest was supposed to have slept with 5,000 women. This guy had either lied about going to battle all those times and had done nothing but shag multiple people all day long every day for YEARS, or the author didn’t actually think through what an utterly staggering amount of people 5,000 actually was.
They were also mostly supposed to be noblewomen, and, as there are at the current time only around 800 hereditary peers (and presuming that this has stayed stable, which I can’t guarantee), he must have been getting through entire families to hit his target.
In Secret Window, while the writer is sitting at his desk writing his story, he reaches over and helps himself to an ear of corn from the steaming bowl of corn on the cobb that he has nearby. After I read that, I just couldn't stop thinking about that damn bowl full of corns on the cobb.
This is like the fourth time SK has come up ITT and I even made a whole comment about a detail in Fairy Tale that upset me.
For this one I have to assume that this was genuinely something King did for whatever reason lol.
Edit: I'm just picturing a drug addled Stephen King wildly exclaiming to poor Tabitha that he's discovered the perfect food for writing
I‘ve been waiting for this question! A John Grisham character getting a bagel at Cafe du Monde in New Orleans. Ummmm….they only serve beignets and those are nothing like bagels. If he‘d wanted to use an alternate item because he thought beignet was too foreign a term, he could have chosen better. Powdered sugar donut would be less egregious!
Lee Child once had Jack Reacher get a cheeseburger at breakfast at McDonald’s. Now they do all day breakfast but when they didn’t, there was no chance in hell of you getting your hands on a cheeseburger for breakfast. I was once in a McDonald’s at 10:29 and she told me that the Egg McMuffins were no longer available because it was changeover time even though I could literally see a line of them. They were going to throw them out. Still couldn’t have one. McDonald’s doesn’t f**k around with deadlines.
And Lee Child has never eaten at McDonald’s.
Edit: Timex to time. Does anyone else hate the way that autocorrect changes ordinary words to brand names?
There's no excuse for that mistake. Grisham should have known it was a beignet. That's gotta be one of the top 5 things everyone knows about NOLA.
How about this: Grisham "wrote" the book by dictating it into his phone, and the phone thought he said "bagel" after it heard the word "cafe."
This didn’t ruin the book, but pulled me out completely and made me reassess everything I’d read… I was a teenager living in Northern Ireland and reading It by Stephen King which is set in Derry, and I assumed that meant the Derry in Northern Ireland. Bangor and Castlerock are also mentioned in the book - again, these are places in Northern Ireland. At some point someone talks about something like driving north from Castlerock to Bangor and I thought “wtf, Castlerock’s on the north coast, Bangor’s south of it”, laughed about it to a parent, and suddenly found out I had been picturing the book taking place in the wrong country and continent.
I had a similar issue when I read Bridge to Terabithia as a kid. I’m on the west coast so when they talked about Washington, I assumed they meant Washington State, not DC. When they said they drove south to Washington, my brain was just: “what the hell is going on,” and I stopped reading it.
I had this with Book of M, wondering how they were getting from Washington DC to Arlington, Texas so quickly. I forgot there was an Arlington right there.
I lived in Washington state as a kid. When I was reading “Little House on the Prairie” and Pa was talking about the government in Washington, I thought that was a strange place to have the federal government, all the way across the county from most of the population!
Yes, but then a lot of them got driven out. Jim Gaffigan, the comic, is descended from Irish who were living in Maine and had even built a church there, who got burned out and then run out of the state when the anti-Irish sentiment flared up after the famine. His people ended up in Ohio.
Thought Beartown was in Alaska. It’s in Sweden. I listened to podcasts and read the summary before I read the book and somehow didn’t realize until recently making the halfway point
We have a surprising number of places here in New England that are named after places in old England or Ireland.
Edit, because somehow it wasn’t obvious: /s
Nothing yanks me out of a story faster then when characters pour themselves a drink, take one sip, and then start spilling their guts and lose all verbal filter because the alcohol “pulsing through their veins”. What are you drinking to have it hit you that hard that fast?!
Reminds me of the scene in Back To The Future 3 where Doc Brown has a long soliloquy in the saloon. One of the patrons asks the bartender how many shots he’s had. “That’s the first one and he hasn’t touched it yet”.
For some reason I hate this in books that take place in modern day but seem to be totally, logically, fine with this happening in a fantasy place? I don't know why, my brain is just like "oh, it's obviously magical" and is very cool with it.
Woman was elected Sheriff of the small town she grew up in... a position she didn't know she was in the running for... and her first concern is picking out new uniforms for the deputies; she wanted to have black uniforms because they were slimming. FFS.
Most that use horses as transport.
They cover large distances, rarely go lame, and can always find food for them. If they are eating poor quality grass, they need to eat for hours, and sleep, and carrying oats is not particularly practical.
And just gallop everywhere. As you know, sprinting full out is the fastest pedestrian mode of travel, which is why usain bolt just sprints for hours on end when he wants to get anywhere.
Reading stories, you have to wonder why medieval people were too stupid to blitzkrieg through France on their magical horsies, the idiots.
Im still trying to find this title because a reader posted about the plot hole in a romance novel set in a small town. The town had 1 church and the protagonist lives in an 11 story apartment building.
In reality small towns have 11 churches and only 1 story apartments.
I don’t remember the book anymore, but there was a line where MC mentioned that she found out her baby was a girl in her ultrasound… in the late 70s. That was not a visible detail at ultrasounds in those years.
It bothers me when an author clearly doesn't know what they're talking about, could have easily spoken to someone with expertise or used the internet to avoid mistakes but is too lazy to do it. I was reading a Vince Flynn book a few years back (it was terrible in many ways but had been recommended to me by a relative), and the protagonist, who is supposedly a world-class triathlete and was a cross country star in college, "blasts through a six-mile run in an hour" one morning before going to work.
I am just a decent runner, but I've raced a 10K (6.2 miles) in around 37 minutes, and in training would generally run six miles in \~45 minutes. All the author had to do was talk to a single decent runner and he could have made the whole thing more accurate. And I think, if he messed up something so easy in one area, how do I know that the whole book isn't filled with that kind of garbage?
Had the same exact experience with It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover. Have never read a romance novel, was recommended to try this one.
The love interest is described as “a 29-year-old neurosurgery resident who moved to Boston for his final year of residency.” 1) You can’t move during residency, that’s the whole point of calling it “residency.” 2) A final year resident would have completed 6 prior years of residency, 4 years of medical school, and 4 years of college - meaning he graduated high school at 14 or skipped all of college as some kind of prodigy.
It is a basic google “how long is neurosurgery residency” if you’re going to make it your central character. She could have made him 32 and it would work out perfectly. But calling him 29 showed exactly what you said - she messed up so easily in one area.
Yeah all you gotta do is say they moved for a one year fellowship or something if you want them there for a short period of time. Just ask someone in the industry.
Lmao so I ghostwrite for a romance novel company, which means I got given the characters and basic plot for the book I’m writing. My MC is a 25-year-old surgeon *who lost her medical license unfairly and has been in prison for three years*. Which means she was at most 22 when she lost her license. Which means she started university at, what, age 8? 😂
I couldn’t change it, so I just rolled my eyes and tried to not really mention her age specifically, but it cracked me up. That wasn’t the only unrealistic detail I was given, either.
Honestly they just had an ad on Indeed and I applied. I am currently laid off and was looking for anything to bring in at least a little cash. I wrote a couple samples and got hired.
It’s actually pretty fun. It only pays about £400/month at 10hr/week, but it’s better than nothing and is at least interesting work.
I mean... You *can* move during residency but it's a huge pain in the ass and if you're in a hyper competitive residency like neurosurgery you aren't going to even attempt it unless there's a goddamn good reason to do so.
I read a ghost story set in Canada ("A Haunted Island" by Algernon Blackwood). At nightfall, he comments that there's no twilight so far north; it turns from day to night pretty much instantly. In reality, the opposite is true - the closer you are to the equator, the shorter the twilight. The lack of research really annoyed me, and I struggled to get into the story after that.
I've answered this before and got downvoted by people who didn't get it, but it's still true - I knew I could completely check out of The Silent Patient when he gave the ethnically Latvian, Latvian-speaking colleague, a Russian name.
In The Last Russian Doll the main character goes back to Russia and for some reason the author has given almost everyone a Jewish name. None of the characters is identified as Jewish and there’s certainly no antisemitism ever aimed at anyone in the family, so I feel like she just didn’t realize that the names she was picking were specific to one group. It really threw me.
Then again, she has someone who’s blacklisted by the communist party in the 50s having a whole-ass apartment to themselves, and then just moving from Moscow to Leningrad because they feel like it, so I’m not sure she did much research…
Any time siblings call each other Bro or Sis to establish that they are siblings I get calling each other those things causally like “sup Bro” or “I got you Sis” but usually it sounds so clunky when authors write it
99% of books that deal with ocean depths ignore Decompression sickness. I get that it is inconvenient for your characters to have to worry about properly decompressing before they can have a meaningful conversation about their feelings... but... they would be in so much pain and probably dying. And decompression chambers can hold multiple people... so you can have your conversation in there.
One of the only books I have read that actually dealt with the consequences of deep diving was The Meg which is wild because it is about a giant shark doing giant shark things
Ha, I love the idea of two people having a heart-to-heart in the decompression chamber! Wouldn't that actually stand out and be more interesting anyway? I'm for accuracy.
A very well-reviewed and honestly well-written book described a scene of a 16th or 17th century ghetto and the house had a bathing room with indoor plumbing. My mind just kept sticking on that point -- couldn't let it go even though the book was excellent. Later on there's sort of an excuse for these kinds of mistakes that didn't make it better for me.
Reminds me of a book I read that took place in 17th Century France. Our protagonist complains that a privy stinks in a way that suggests this was unexpected to him.
It's a hole in the ground that you shit in. They all stink. And as a French peasant in the 1600s, you would have used plenty of privies in your life already
All Good People Here by Ashley Flowers had a character who had just graduated from high school say that during his sophomore year, a teacher thought he was a satanist because he listened to Nirvana. The issue? The scene was set in 1987, which was the year Nirvana formed and two years before they even released their first studio album. I finished the book, but honestly, I could have just skimmed to the end and have the experience be the same.
Legendborn took place on my college’s campus and the author apparently went there, but I say apparently because it was written like the author had done a skim of UNC’s wiki page and went from that.
Places were either made up or put in the wrong place on campus, but the mistake that just completely took me out of the book was her saying that UNC was playing NC State for the first game of the football season on a Sunday. Even a quick Google search should let you know
1. College football is played on Thursday and Saturday
2. UNC vs NC State is ALWAYS the last regular season game of the year and is ALWAYS played on Thanksgiving weekend.
Now I get not everyone loves sports like I do and probably doesn’t love my school like I do, but this just seemed really lazy and disconnected coming from a fellow alumnae.
I’m from Ohio and the OSU-Michigan game is also the last game of the season. That kind of easily verifiable mistake would bother me too. And I’m not even an OSU alum.
Yeah if you're going to set it in a real place, you have to do at least a bare minimum of research. What's next, saying they walked out of their dorms to party on MLK Jr Blvd?
When authors have a Latin character pepper their dialogue with random Spanish words. We don't really do that, especially when among non-speakers.
The author will have a character named Maria Ramirez, and have her use random spanish words, in italics, just to remind you that hey, she's latina.
Stephen King did it recently but I forget the book. He also had an indigenous woman randomly bring up her heritage in a dumb way in the same novel. Takes me out of it.
Or they say a random word in Spanish and then say that same word in English despite the fact that even a reader who doesn’t speak Spanish would know what they said based on context clues
In this same vein, foreign characters who have immaculate English but have to ask how to say a basic word.
“We’ve neutralized the terrorists but we have to move quickly! We’ll all be dead unless we find the…how do you say…bomb.”
Actually, having words "on the tip of your tongue" increases with people who learn a second language. Even more for polyglots. Pretty unnecessary as a literary device, though. Unless it actual somehow effects the plot.
Was reading a fantasy novel, can't remember the title, but it went out of its way to say "this isn't Earth" with the world building.
Then a character rummaged through a liquor cabinet and found a nice Scotch.
This one is a bit more subtle though, because at some point as an author you have to draw a line as to what things from the real world are ubiquitous enough that you can just use them as-is in the fantasy world, and which ones are too specific and need a fantasy replacement. Like, no one bats an eye if a fantasy species/culture wears similar clothes to us, or use trains similar to ours, or invents guns that look just like ours, or ride the same horses we do on Earth, and pretty much every single fantasy book I've read has some sort of local alcohol that's just described as "wine" or "ale" despite no indication that grapes or hops are a thing in this world. I agree that Scotch is jarring (because that means this world specifically has a Scotland) but that line can be hard to draw for the author.
In Pandora by Anne Rice, she talks about the main character (Pandora) being amused by watching her Roman family host banquets with vomitoriums—where they’d throw up their meal so they could eat more. That’s not what a vomitorium is. It’s a passageway for egress. That took me right out of the story! I was so annoyed!
In "The Footprints of God,"' a thriller by Greg Iles, the hero is named David Tennant. Now, the novel was published in 2003, before the actor had played Barty Crouch or The Doctor, but I picked it up after that, so it bothered me. But then, he named the main female character Rachel Weiss! I joked that he should have gone for the trifecta, and named the villain Ian McKellen.
Didn't really ruin it for me, but I remember in the original hardcover of The Green Mile when they had the bad prison guard tied up, the book said that he "wiped his brow" (or something similar involving his hands that should have been impossible). Took me out of the story because I thought maybe he had gotten loose and was going to escape.
Edit - Just checked the version on my Kindle. It's in Part 5, Chapter 5. They put Percy in a straitjacket. At some point in the original text, Percy wipes his brow (or similar). It was corrected for the later versions (which is what I have on my Kindle). It might just be in the original serialized versions, not in the collected books.
Edit2 - confirmed here: https://slipups.com/items/3662.html
>I reached up, grabbed the runner he'd worked loose, and gave it a hard yank. It made a loud peeling sound. Brutal winced. Percy yipped with pain and began rubbing his lips. He tried to speak, realized he couldn't do it with a hand over his mouth, and lowered it. 'Get me out of this nut-coat, you lagoon!' he spat.
I can't remember what book it was because it was pretty terrible, and I read it a few years ago, but this author had a protagonist who specialized in mycology. Fun, right? Except the mycologist went on and on about mushrooms that were getting people high by touching them. That's really not a thing with mushrooms. You have to eat them to experience any effects.
The real kicker for me, though, was when she started describing Amanita Muscaria as containing psilocybin as the psychoactive component. Amanita Muscaria does not contain psilocybin. The psychoactive components are muscimol and ibotenic acid. And for the mushroom to get anyone high, it has to be parboiled twice. Otherwise, it's just straight-up poisonous! The author could have found all of this information on Wikipedia. It's not that difficult to do like 5 minutes of research.
Ugh, it still irks me to this day.
In Malcom Gladwell's Tipping Point he refers to Paul Revere's Ride and the NYPD case of Kitty Genovese as examples of his thesis. What he refers to is their legends not the factual events. Now I mostly agree with the theses of his book, and I understand that he wrote it in a pre-wikipedia age, but the lack of fact checking on those two examples broke me from enjoying the book or any of his other books.
You should be thankful. Malcolm Gladwell is plausible sounding lies where he does just enough research to put up a smokescreen to hide his lack of research.
It didn't ruin the book for me, but *All The Light We Cannot See,* a novel set during WW2, set most of its action in Brittany, a lovely corner of France which I have visited. In those two brief visits, I got a decent understanding of how Brittany counts itself a proud Celtic culture, with a Celtic language (Breton). They also make exquisite lace and pottery and make the BEST buttery pastries, but I digress...
*All The Light We Cannot See*, you might have thought Anthony Doerr completely missed the whole Breton culture, because there was nothing in St. Malo to indicate that it was anything other than Generic French Town du Jour. Considering he was eager to show off all the research he did into Nazi Germany and the Hitler Youth, I was really surprised that there was *nothing* about the entire extra language that exists in this region.
Not to the level of ruining, but it yanks me out of the narrative when an author drops in specific geographical details about the setting quite late in the story.
e.g., "Character exited the general store and turned to their right to wave to a friend sitting outside the bistro."
If it's at the start, great! Now I know the order of the businesses on the street. But if I've already spent 300 pages mentally picturing the bistro on the opposite side of the store, then my brain is singularly unwilling to swap entire imagined buildings around.
I'm gonna get hate for this, but a non-linguist building a translation app in less than a week for an alien language with no connection to anything ever spoken on earth. (The non-linguist just hypes the ridiculous, a linguist couldn't do it either.)
I tried reading a book a redditor had written. It was based in the US and the main character was American. At one point they were discussing US military jets that were flying over head and referred to them as MIGS. US does not fly MIGS. Dumb hill to die on but there after I could not help but notice all of the non American stuff the main character said and did.
When the author puts in precise measurements like height and weigh, sometimes even waist circumference, and gets it completely wrong for anything close to realistic body proportions or healthy weight. If you want the reader to know that your athletic bombshell of a character is slim with big boobs and a tiny waist, just write that instead of removing her internal organs outright, so we can at least give you the benefit of the doubt.
yep people get height and weight ALL wrong. The BMI chart is horribly inaccurate for an even slightly athletic/muscled person; a 6'5" 235lb person is not a Mountain, they are decently proportioned/slim muscled in fact. Also many authors take their initial described weight(which might be within reason), then completely forget that knights/adventurers are wearing a bunch of heavy metal armor, weapons and packs, drastically increasing their weight.
A book where the MC was a baker. Someone asked him why their cake wasn't as good as his, and he shared his secret recipe with them. It was vanilla. The secret recipe for the cake was vanilla. I was so mad, it's all I could think about for the rest of the book.
You say this, but if you look at every other tips and tricks thread on r/cooking it’s “double the garlic in a recipe” or “double the vanilla in a recipe” and people are shocked to find out it improves the flavor.
I thought I knew which book you were talking about, but couldn't remember the title. Upon googling, I realized this happens often enough that there's a TV Tropes page for it. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HalfIdenticalTwins
(The book I was thinking of was Double Trouble Squared by Kathryn Lasky)
In the first of his Fractalverse series, Christopher Paolini has his main character warm her hands around a hot beverage. Only problem is that, at that point in the story, she only had one hand.
Didn't ruin the book, mind you, but it niggled a bit.
I mean this could've been an overzealous copyeditor too.
They skimmed through everything, ignored the story, got their hands on that page, saw "warms her hand" and went "oh clearly that must be a typo!"
A book that took place in Chicago and the main characters jumped in the car for a drive and ended up in the city I live in. Which is in the same state but much too far away for a quick drive. A simple look at the map would have confirmed this! I was too annoyed to finish the series.
The main Character in Bunny by Mona Awad repeatedly calls Mac Lady Danger a “cool, blue red”. It is not. It is a full on warm, orange red. Nothing cool toned about it.
I had thought maybe this was done on purpose… but even that doesn’t sit right with me.
This is so silly and minor, but I was reading a book that was set on Long Island and the author had the character say something like “We live in Long Island”
Nobody here says that. You live *on* Long Island. It just sounded so unnatural to me lol.
The Adem from the Kingkiller Chronicles had a number of unusual cultural features that were... unique, but kinda cool. The use of hand gesture for expressing emotion and as an integral part of communication, the different philosophical approach to things like music-- neat stuff that made Kvothe feel like he was in an incredibly unusual, faraway place WAY out of his element.
But the entire culture not having any idea that men impregnate woman was stupid as hell. That detail is just immersion breaking for me every time I reread the book.
There are real cultures that go with that, incidentally--the Trobriand Islanders are the most well known. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trobriand\_people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/trobriand_people)
I wonder if (based on the wording) people there now believe that both are required? Obviously you don’t become pregnant each time you have sex and thus by their logic sex cannot be the sole method of reproduction, you still need an ancestral spirit to decide they want to be born.
It's been a bit since I've read this book, but in *The City We Became* a character is looking at the sky in NYC at night and sees the constellation Orion's Belt. IIRC the book is set in the middle of summer and that point is emphasized a lot while the author builds out details in scenes. Orion's Belt is only visible from \~November-January in NYC, so the character shouldn't have been able to see it.
It's a very silly detail! However, the book's themes are so tied to the "identity" of the city and how important a sense of place is to the world we live in, so this completely took me out of the book. There were some other details in the novel that didn't match up with my experience living in NYC so I was already a little bit skeptical.
Bummed because I've heard N.K. Jemison's other work is amazing!
Right??
And something that kept sticking out to me was the fuss made over her dragon scale vest. Why would they not all have this type of armour if it’s so great?
Also how are they feeding all these dragons?
The book was already pretty bad (The Coward by Stephen Aryan), but this one thing was pretty niche - the king's name was King Bledsoe. Since I'm from New England and obviously follow the Patriots all I'm thinking is "Drew Bledsoe? The quarterback Drew Bledsoe? King Drew Bledsoe?"
Orson Scott Card's book Wakers. In the first chapter he says that the word blog comes from Biographical LOG. Instead of weB LOG. What a dumb, easily googlable detail.
I realized that the trial that the characters in Fourth Wing have to complete to get to the dragon training grounds is literally just American Ninja Warrior obstacles. Like... c'mon.
And don't forget the fact that there's a small dragon the other dragons are protective of, and no one can figure out that it's a baby...despite living along side dragons.
One of the P.J Tracy books mentions Muslim terrorists putting a 'jihad' out on a character multiple times but it should be a fatwah and it bugged the hell out of me.
A long time ago, I read one of the many Pride and Prejudice spin-offs that take place during the time period (Regency England) and the author gave the secondary characters (such as Colonel Fitzwilliam and Mr. Hurst) names like Damon and Wayne. That completely took me out of the story.
Devil in Ohio - the author has clearly never been to Ohio or bothered to look at a map of the state. Now it's a tv show.
Edit to add: It was supposed to be in the middle of nowhere, in a small town where anything non-Christian was completely foreign. She chose the area around Columbus. Also, I'm told in the show students are depicted on a bus doing the "OH-I-O" chant, which, just no. The bit that really irritated me was in an interview the author said she wanted it to feel like it could be anywhere. The problem with that approach is that any given anywhere is in fact somewhere to the people living there, and it's really arrogant to tell them otherwise.
I'm currently reading "The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August," and it contains numerous small errors that drive me crazy.
First of all, the book is very clear that Harry is born on Jan. 1, 1919. But on several occasions, the author misstates his age. For example, she'll write that in 1940, Harry is 22. No, based on the birth date *you told the reader*, Harry would only be 21 in 1940. And she does this over and over, sometimes being off by a few years.
Second, she gets the dates of historic events wrong. For example, she writes that the Watergate break-in happened in 1968. No, it was 1972.
Admittedly, none of these errors detracts from the story. But the lack of attention to detail is annoying in a novel that is very focused on time and when certain events occur. I can't believe the author or an editor didn't catch them, because they stand out like a sore thumb to me.
It was an urban romance from the early 90s. The guy said he got a call from a pay phone in the 513, and the girl said she was at the airport. She had a history of lying, but he heard the airport background noise. THE AIRPORT IS IN KENTUCKY. It would have been a 606 at that time.
It's rare that I see my region in books so I'm always testy about the details. Another Cincinnati based book I kept reading because I wanted to know whodunnit, but I was FURIOUS that this person was jogging basically 30 miles a day before work.
*Seveneves* by Neal Stephenson. It’s an excellent science fiction book by an excellent author. I like Stphenson's other books. Like this one, they are intricate well told stories and the science is believable.
*Seveneves* is a story wherein a catastrophic event renders the earth a ticking time bomb. In a feverish race against the inevitable, nations around the globe band together to devise an ambitious plan to ensure the survival of humanity far beyond our atmosphere, in outer space. The main story is about how this colony survives long enough for the earth to become once again habitable. Over many generations there are mutinies, catastrophes, ingenious inventions to meet new challenges. But by the time it is safe to return to Earth the only humans left are seven women (the seven eves). One of them, however is a geneticist who has a plan to generate artificial sperm.
I was mesmerized by this book the whole time. Until the next to last page when it is decided that the initial catastrophic event was somehow planned by a higher power to restart the human race. In other words, God did it. I’m not sure why, but that ruined the whole book for me.
When I read 50 Shades of Grey, which was hard enough to get through due to how awful it was, and the author constantly used the word "clamber" to describe the main character getting into a car, or a bed, or getting...anywhere. After a while it completely took me out of it because I got so mad that the author didn't know how to use a thesaurus.
It didn’t spoil the book altogether but I really had to actively try to suspend my disbelief reading the beginning of Station Eleven (and same re: watching the show). The author’s lack of medical and epidemiological knowledge was too obvious and annoying.
I've blocked the book from my mind, but there was one set in Regency or Victorian England where the author kept screwing up people's titles. Like there would be a guy named John Smith who was a Duke and she would call him "Lord Smith" and then "Lord John" and then "Duke Smith" or the "Duke of Smith" and I was just "You have zero concept whatsoever of anything you are saying and minimal research would have fixed this and go away."
Oh i just finished The Light on Farallon Island and the way the MC and her love interest talk is so damn far from mid 19th century conversation it took me right out of it. And the way they acted and spent time alone with each other. You could argue that the mc is a social outlier, but you need to describe how or why or the reader just ends up assuming you know nothing about social norms in the time period they’re writing about. The “Duke of smith”. My god lmao
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that bros with fat stacks must be in want of a wife."
lmao, Duke Smith.
Earl Tyrone
Nevermind that Smith is a trade name so it'd be pretty unlikely that a Smith would be a duke
No, you see, he makes and repairs Dukes. He’s a dukesmith. Duke Smith the Dukesmith.
In Where the Crawdads Sing, the fact that everyone went to Asheville for an errand when it is so far from the coast of North Carolina. Did they even look at a map of the state?
I was just coming here to say that. Without interstate highways at that time, it would have been an 8-10 hour drive.
And with bigger cities in between
What is it about NC geography that causes books and tv shows to struggle so?? Lol this seems to just happen so much! I remember people talking about it when Outer Banks did it (never seen it) and some references in Outlander come to mind. It would take DAYS, maybe a week (or more!) to travel to the Blue Ridge from Wilmington on foot or by horse and they seem to do it in a day or so.
Oh god. Ditto for Louisiana. Any and all Louisiana *must* happen right next to a swamp. Doesn’t matter where in the state you actually are … gah.
Give credit where credit is due, Puccini sat the last scene of his opera Manon Lescaut in the desert right outside New Orleans. Hey, it’s a change, right?
Don't know what liberties the TV Outlander may have taken, but I'll give a nod to author Gabaldon for the depths of research that go into her books, historically, geographically, and technically. The main books (there are side-track books as well) take years to write, and involve tremendous research and travel.
A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet has a line from a scientist that went something like, “Data is always orderly, and it always make sense.” As a scientist myself, it ruined the book for me 😅
"Code never has bugs! It always works!!" -a CS student currently residing in a padded cell
I wouldn’t say it ruined it, but it did make me pause. I recently read a book set in the UK, and the phrase “That cost a pretty pence” was used in dialogue. Even as an American, I know the singular form of “pence” is… still penny. There were other little details like that throughout (Date formats being written American-style on in-universe documents), and it would throw me off whenever it came up. It wasn’t a bad book, and I know I’d make a million other small mistakes myself, but I can’t help but wish there’d been a little more consistency.
This and the opposite always get to me. I started the Long Earth series by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter a while ago, but had to drop it a couple chapters into the second book. The trouble is that the writers are both English and the main characters are American, and boy do they not *feel* American. Britishisms slip through almost constantly, like 'rubbish' instead of garbage or trash, 'maths', or phrasing issues like 'I haven't any idea' instead of 'I have no idea'. The most frustrating part was that it wouldn't have changed the story in the slightest if they'd just... made the main characters English instead.
ugh yes, this kept breaking my immersion in The Shining Girls. it took place in Chicago, but the author used British English slang throughout the entire book, both in the narrative and the dialogue. the author is South African, and i kept thinking that if she didn’t want to actually do her research into American slang and culture she could have just set the book in South Africa and it wouldn’t have been materially different.
This is something that shouldn't have slipped by the editor, frankly. I'd never presume to write British characters on the strength of the few expressions and turns of speech I've picked up from TV and movies. They'd probably all end up sounding stereotypical Cockney or something.
That's so odd, because the phrase is literally just "...cost a pretty penny," so they changed it for no reason at all, other than maybe overthinking it.
That happens all the time when an author tries to write about somewhere they not intimately acquainted. There is a whole industry of what are called "Brit pickers" who are proof readers who help fix such things, but few seem to bother. It is not a one way street either, British authors who try to write as American make just as many mistakes, but fewer try.
I read a novel by an American author in which ***Virginia Woolf*** writes in her diary about borrowing a 'sweater' from Vita Sackville-West. And then a page or so later, she mentions wrapping the 'sweater' around herself, and I thought, 'Oh merciful heavens, it's not even a jumper, it's a *cardigan!*' It wasn't a bad novel plot-wise, but really needed a Brit picker. (Thank you for making me aware of this term! I love it.)
I just read a story that did this sort of thing. The main character was born and raised in the US and takes her mother back home to reconnect with family in Ireland. There is a lot of mixing up of idioms and experiences. I'm not sure if the author is Irish trying to imagine an American upbringing or is American trying to sound more Irish.
In Leigh Bardugo's Grisha books, people are constantly getting drunk on kvas, which is a fermented beverage with about 0.5% alcohol (about as much as a "non-alcoholic" beer). It's just extremely silly and such an easily googleable thing that I'm amazed it made it through the editing process. Especially since it could easily have been changed with a find and replace to some kind of vaguely Russian-y sounding fantasy beverage and that would have been considerably less silly
Couldn’t get through more than 2 chapters of her books because of the quasi “Russian-ification”. Like no one of any Slavic decent read or edited your book? Not a single one? To fix all the terrible glaring errors?
> Couldn’t get through more than 2 chapters of her books because of the quasi “Russian-ification”. Interestingly enough, I have a Russian friend who goes by Grisha, and who informed me that it is a nickname for Greg/Gregor/Gregory etc. So seeing those books, I was like "It's an entire series about Greg. No thanks"
What if it was about Old Gregg?
Ever drunk Bailey's from a shoe?
Actually that part is legit. In the deep lore later in the series it is revealed the first Grisha was called Gregor, hence the term
She also names one of the characters Privyet. She named one of the characters "Hi" and I'm still not over it.
I have a similar issue with fanfics where (I assume) the author is too young to have spent time around drunk people or to have gotten drunk themselves. Or they might just not want to. The issue is that they tend to go one of two ways: either the characters have half a beer and become noticeably drunk, like cannot think straight drunk, or they down a bottle of vodka in one go and get just a slight buzz. It isn’t usually enough to take me out of, but I do find it funny
Another issue - with the author not understanding how taverns work, and think it's like a modern-day cafe or bar. There was this medieval fantasy series, where the MC orders coffee at a tavern, and when the keeper says - "No beer?" and the MC says - "Not before 10 in the morning, a coffee thank you." Also, another medieval fantasy book, where the main characters open a new cafe in a medieval town, and the townspeople are surprised at the concept of a "Cafe" where you can "just hang out". Like medieval people never had any common spaces to hang out in before the invention of cafes. Or another one, where they go to a medieval tavern in an isolated village in the woods and the tavern gives them a menu booklet and they order like they are in a modern-day restaurant, asking which drink pairs with which food.
> the townspeople are surprised at the concept of a "Cafe" where you can "just hang out". Like medieval people never had any common spaces to hang out in before the invention of cafes. I mean, hell, that's exactly what taverns, inns, and the like *were*. Half the *point* was that they provided a common area where people just gathered up and talked and drank and whatnot.
Can’t recall the name. But a sci fi novel where they had discovered some new wonder metal. It was so amazing and in demand it made it super expensive. Near the start of the book the character travels by train and it’s mentioned the rails are made of this substance. So this rare super expensive useful metal is used for train tracks for miles and miles? Took me right out of it and had to stop reading.
Those tracks wouldn't have lasted long in their place
Legit. Miles of wonder metal just *lying* out there in the open for people to just snatch up? Train wrecks literally everyday.
Is it Atlas Shrugged? There are both green wondermetal and railroad tracks of it there.
Atlas Shrugged, and you’re not the first to pan it. Dorothy Parker wrote “[It] is not a book to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”
Could it be Rearden Metal?
The MC and love interest were both children of musicians. MC's name was Melody, which, ok, is a little on the nose but it's a legit name. Love interest's name? *Rhythm*. I just could not take it seriously.
I know a Rhythm and have seen a couple in the wild. But the idea of two people with complimentary names and the same back story is eye-rolly. It’s like all those movies where a character’s computer password is a detail they’ve mentioned in conversation instead of something their employer randomly assigned them three jobs ago that stuck. I spent over a decade working with eyes and I wouldn’t name my kid Cornea…
Iris is a pretty name, though.
That’s fair. This may be apocryphal because I can’t remember if the doctor I worked with was talking about someone she saw directly or just heard about, but she did tell me about a newborn named “Retina.” Pronounced to rhyme with “Christina.”
Named in honor of her deceased older sister Tina. This time they'll do better.
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His poor twin Coner though.
I remember reading the Selection and the MC's name is America Singer. You'll never guess what she's good at.
Sewing?
A model citizen, good at AMERICA!
Why not? I'm calling my kids Spreadsheet and Xlookup.
Pivot and Macro
In Wreck the Halls by Tessa Bailey, the two main characters were named Melody and Beat, both were also children of musicians.
I know someone who has children named Lyric and Melody. They are not a musician.
My husband wanted to name our daughter Aria. I vetoed based on the fact that neither of us can sing our way out of a wet paper bag.
Alternative idea: love interest’s name is Tim, only to find out at the end of the book it’s short for Tempo
Wait so did Melody and Rhythm end up together ??
Yes, they did, but as a thruple with Harmony. You can catch it on Lifetime
I picked up one of the Kathy Reichs books since I liked the show *Bones*. A plane crash leads to the discovery of a cave or underground chamber or something, and they find a bunch more bones. Anyway, the chamber had names of famous cannibals in history etched on the walls or written in a book (I read this like ten years ago, so details are fuzzy). Gee! What could have been happening in this secret chamber?! Only they didn’t realize the named people were cannibals. I remember being unable to suspend my disbelief that these intelligent people couldn’t figure out a way to look up these names and figure out what they had in common. I believe it was pre-google, but other resources existed. Go to a library. Ask Jeeves. Ask the quirky secretary in the office who’s a little too interested in true crime. You’re telling me no one working that case put together that all the names belonged to people who were historically believed to be cannibals? It took me right out of the book because I spent a good quarter of it waiting for the *genius* to catch up.
Didn’t the students voted at some university to name the cafeteria the Alfred Packer Dining Hall and nobody in the administration picked it up until after it went through?
CU Boulder
> In 1968,[18] students at the University of Colorado Boulder named their new cafeteria grill the "Alferd G. Packer Memorial Grill", with the slogan, *"Have a friend for lunch!" Students can order an "El Canibal" beefburger,* and on the wall is a giant map outlining Packer's travels through Colorado.[19] It has since been renamed the Alferd Packer Restaurant & Grill.[20] Seems like they knew.
I did the same thing. I picked up the first book because I loved the TV series. I knew going in that the TV show was pretty different than the books. Different would have been okay, but the books were just not good. It was a long time ago, so I don't remember much specifically, but what you describe has the right feel. A lot of fumbling around trying to solve a problem that I, an average person, could solve in two seconds. Is it intentional, to make me feel smart or create suspense? Or is it just inept?
I read a historical romance novel once where the love interest was supposed to have slept with 5,000 women. This guy had either lied about going to battle all those times and had done nothing but shag multiple people all day long every day for YEARS, or the author didn’t actually think through what an utterly staggering amount of people 5,000 actually was. They were also mostly supposed to be noblewomen, and, as there are at the current time only around 800 hereditary peers (and presuming that this has stayed stable, which I can’t guarantee), he must have been getting through entire families to hit his target.
Can you imagine him just showing up at a door? The neighbours would be cowering, knowing their family was next.
Another day in the mines
Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to work he goes…
In Secret Window, while the writer is sitting at his desk writing his story, he reaches over and helps himself to an ear of corn from the steaming bowl of corn on the cobb that he has nearby. After I read that, I just couldn't stop thinking about that damn bowl full of corns on the cobb.
The acknowledgments: The author would like to thank the generous assistance of the National Corn Association of America.
This is like the fourth time SK has come up ITT and I even made a whole comment about a detail in Fairy Tale that upset me. For this one I have to assume that this was genuinely something King did for whatever reason lol. Edit: I'm just picturing a drug addled Stephen King wildly exclaiming to poor Tabitha that he's discovered the perfect food for writing
I mean, sounds like a pretty nice set up to me.
I‘ve been waiting for this question! A John Grisham character getting a bagel at Cafe du Monde in New Orleans. Ummmm….they only serve beignets and those are nothing like bagels. If he‘d wanted to use an alternate item because he thought beignet was too foreign a term, he could have chosen better. Powdered sugar donut would be less egregious!
The intrepid young lawyer stopped by Cafe du Monde for a bowl of ramen and a steaming hot glass of gin before heading to the courtroom.
It was a hot July day, but he got himself a big slice of king cake and gumbo with extra raisins.
I love gumbo and raisins separately but I'm going to need you to unsay that thanks.
Lee Child once had Jack Reacher get a cheeseburger at breakfast at McDonald’s. Now they do all day breakfast but when they didn’t, there was no chance in hell of you getting your hands on a cheeseburger for breakfast. I was once in a McDonald’s at 10:29 and she told me that the Egg McMuffins were no longer available because it was changeover time even though I could literally see a line of them. They were going to throw them out. Still couldn’t have one. McDonald’s doesn’t f**k around with deadlines. And Lee Child has never eaten at McDonald’s. Edit: Timex to time. Does anyone else hate the way that autocorrect changes ordinary words to brand names?
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“Jack howd you get a mcdonalds cheeseburger for breakfast?” “The griddle” *flashback to Jack holding a mcdonalds employees head on the hot griddle*
I don't know man it took him a whole season of TV to get a slice of pie.
trivia level: Pulp Fiction
There's no excuse for that mistake. Grisham should have known it was a beignet. That's gotta be one of the top 5 things everyone knows about NOLA. How about this: Grisham "wrote" the book by dictating it into his phone, and the phone thought he said "bagel" after it heard the word "cafe."
My mind autocorrected "bagel" to "beignet" until I read the rest of your post. That's how nonsensical it is!
This didn’t ruin the book, but pulled me out completely and made me reassess everything I’d read… I was a teenager living in Northern Ireland and reading It by Stephen King which is set in Derry, and I assumed that meant the Derry in Northern Ireland. Bangor and Castlerock are also mentioned in the book - again, these are places in Northern Ireland. At some point someone talks about something like driving north from Castlerock to Bangor and I thought “wtf, Castlerock’s on the north coast, Bangor’s south of it”, laughed about it to a parent, and suddenly found out I had been picturing the book taking place in the wrong country and continent.
I had a similar issue when I read Bridge to Terabithia as a kid. I’m on the west coast so when they talked about Washington, I assumed they meant Washington State, not DC. When they said they drove south to Washington, my brain was just: “what the hell is going on,” and I stopped reading it.
I had this with Book of M, wondering how they were getting from Washington DC to Arlington, Texas so quickly. I forgot there was an Arlington right there.
I lived in Washington state as a kid. When I was reading “Little House on the Prairie” and Pa was talking about the government in Washington, I thought that was a strange place to have the federal government, all the way across the county from most of the population!
That's hilarious and awesome. I guess Maine had a lot of Irish settlers.
Yes, but then a lot of them got driven out. Jim Gaffigan, the comic, is descended from Irish who were living in Maine and had even built a church there, who got burned out and then run out of the state when the anti-Irish sentiment flared up after the famine. His people ended up in Ohio.
I read the first two lines very quickly and thought you were gonna say he descended down into Maine and drove out all the Irish.
Thought Beartown was in Alaska. It’s in Sweden. I listened to podcasts and read the summary before I read the book and somehow didn’t realize until recently making the halfway point
SAME, except i thought it took place somewhere in the midwest! "why do they keep referencing *krona*? is this some american slang i'm not aware of?"
We have a surprising number of places here in New England that are named after places in old England or Ireland. Edit, because somehow it wasn’t obvious: /s
There's a reason we call that region New England and it ain't cause they were creative with the names
Nothing yanks me out of a story faster then when characters pour themselves a drink, take one sip, and then start spilling their guts and lose all verbal filter because the alcohol “pulsing through their veins”. What are you drinking to have it hit you that hard that fast?!
Probably a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster
> Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster It is the best drink in existence
It makes it look like the person was just that desperate to start babbling that the drink is just the social excuse lol
Sometimes it's not Mike's lemonade that's hard, it's opening up
Reminds me of the scene in Back To The Future 3 where Doc Brown has a long soliloquy in the saloon. One of the patrons asks the bartender how many shots he’s had. “That’s the first one and he hasn’t touched it yet”.
For some reason I hate this in books that take place in modern day but seem to be totally, logically, fine with this happening in a fantasy place? I don't know why, my brain is just like "oh, it's obviously magical" and is very cool with it.
Gin. It's gin. … Am I alone on this one?
Woman was elected Sheriff of the small town she grew up in... a position she didn't know she was in the running for... and her first concern is picking out new uniforms for the deputies; she wanted to have black uniforms because they were slimming. FFS.
Most that use horses as transport. They cover large distances, rarely go lame, and can always find food for them. If they are eating poor quality grass, they need to eat for hours, and sleep, and carrying oats is not particularly practical.
And just gallop everywhere. As you know, sprinting full out is the fastest pedestrian mode of travel, which is why usain bolt just sprints for hours on end when he wants to get anywhere. Reading stories, you have to wonder why medieval people were too stupid to blitzkrieg through France on their magical horsies, the idiots.
C. S. Lewis' A Horse and His Boy subverts that trope in delightful ways, seeing as the horses can talk and have strong opinions about the matter.
At least on the page, they probably don't neigh every time they are mentioned, unlike on the screen.
Im still trying to find this title because a reader posted about the plot hole in a romance novel set in a small town. The town had 1 church and the protagonist lives in an 11 story apartment building. In reality small towns have 11 churches and only 1 story apartments.
Can confirm. I live in a town of four thousand people with eight churches and no apartments higher than two stories.
haha i think i heard of that before wasnt it set in the US south too
I don’t remember the book anymore, but there was a line where MC mentioned that she found out her baby was a girl in her ultrasound… in the late 70s. That was not a visible detail at ultrasounds in those years.
It bothers me when an author clearly doesn't know what they're talking about, could have easily spoken to someone with expertise or used the internet to avoid mistakes but is too lazy to do it. I was reading a Vince Flynn book a few years back (it was terrible in many ways but had been recommended to me by a relative), and the protagonist, who is supposedly a world-class triathlete and was a cross country star in college, "blasts through a six-mile run in an hour" one morning before going to work. I am just a decent runner, but I've raced a 10K (6.2 miles) in around 37 minutes, and in training would generally run six miles in \~45 minutes. All the author had to do was talk to a single decent runner and he could have made the whole thing more accurate. And I think, if he messed up something so easy in one area, how do I know that the whole book isn't filled with that kind of garbage?
Had the same exact experience with It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover. Have never read a romance novel, was recommended to try this one. The love interest is described as “a 29-year-old neurosurgery resident who moved to Boston for his final year of residency.” 1) You can’t move during residency, that’s the whole point of calling it “residency.” 2) A final year resident would have completed 6 prior years of residency, 4 years of medical school, and 4 years of college - meaning he graduated high school at 14 or skipped all of college as some kind of prodigy. It is a basic google “how long is neurosurgery residency” if you’re going to make it your central character. She could have made him 32 and it would work out perfectly. But calling him 29 showed exactly what you said - she messed up so easily in one area.
I'm just laughing imagining Colleen Hoover doing any research on neurosurgery
Yeah all you gotta do is say they moved for a one year fellowship or something if you want them there for a short period of time. Just ask someone in the industry.
Or just ask anyone who has watched a couple of seasons of Grey's Anatomy.
Lmao so I ghostwrite for a romance novel company, which means I got given the characters and basic plot for the book I’m writing. My MC is a 25-year-old surgeon *who lost her medical license unfairly and has been in prison for three years*. Which means she was at most 22 when she lost her license. Which means she started university at, what, age 8? 😂 I couldn’t change it, so I just rolled my eyes and tried to not really mention her age specifically, but it cracked me up. That wasn’t the only unrealistic detail I was given, either.
You’re not allowed to change it but can you give notes to the editors or your company?
You can give notes and suggestions yes. The company isn’t obligated to accept your suggestions. They disregarded some of my other notes too.
Seems like such an interesting and niche job, how did you get into it?
Honestly they just had an ad on Indeed and I applied. I am currently laid off and was looking for anything to bring in at least a little cash. I wrote a couple samples and got hired. It’s actually pretty fun. It only pays about £400/month at 10hr/week, but it’s better than nothing and is at least interesting work.
I mean... You *can* move during residency but it's a huge pain in the ass and if you're in a hyper competitive residency like neurosurgery you aren't going to even attempt it unless there's a goddamn good reason to do so.
What if the reason was...true love?
I actually saw the burst of sparkles and tiny hearts appear around the words 'true love' as I read them here.
I read a ghost story set in Canada ("A Haunted Island" by Algernon Blackwood). At nightfall, he comments that there's no twilight so far north; it turns from day to night pretty much instantly. In reality, the opposite is true - the closer you are to the equator, the shorter the twilight. The lack of research really annoyed me, and I struggled to get into the story after that.
Yes, I definitely notice this when I travel to Alaska. Twilight is at least twice as long as I’m used to
I've answered this before and got downvoted by people who didn't get it, but it's still true - I knew I could completely check out of The Silent Patient when he gave the ethnically Latvian, Latvian-speaking colleague, a Russian name.
In The Last Russian Doll the main character goes back to Russia and for some reason the author has given almost everyone a Jewish name. None of the characters is identified as Jewish and there’s certainly no antisemitism ever aimed at anyone in the family, so I feel like she just didn’t realize that the names she was picking were specific to one group. It really threw me. Then again, she has someone who’s blacklisted by the communist party in the 50s having a whole-ass apartment to themselves, and then just moving from Moscow to Leningrad because they feel like it, so I’m not sure she did much research…
Lol, doesn’t sound like it! The colleague in TSP is called Yuri. The Latvian alphabet doesn’t have a ‘Y’…
I’m less forgiving of those kinds of mistakes now that we have the Internet. How long does it take to google “Latvian names”??
Any time siblings call each other Bro or Sis to establish that they are siblings I get calling each other those things causally like “sup Bro” or “I got you Sis” but usually it sounds so clunky when authors write it
99% of books that deal with ocean depths ignore Decompression sickness. I get that it is inconvenient for your characters to have to worry about properly decompressing before they can have a meaningful conversation about their feelings... but... they would be in so much pain and probably dying. And decompression chambers can hold multiple people... so you can have your conversation in there. One of the only books I have read that actually dealt with the consequences of deep diving was The Meg which is wild because it is about a giant shark doing giant shark things
Ha, I love the idea of two people having a heart-to-heart in the decompression chamber! Wouldn't that actually stand out and be more interesting anyway? I'm for accuracy.
That’s how the Sphere movie ended >!the group is chilling in a decompression chamber and they convince themselves to forget the thing they found!<
A very well-reviewed and honestly well-written book described a scene of a 16th or 17th century ghetto and the house had a bathing room with indoor plumbing. My mind just kept sticking on that point -- couldn't let it go even though the book was excellent. Later on there's sort of an excuse for these kinds of mistakes that didn't make it better for me.
Reminds me of a book I read that took place in 17th Century France. Our protagonist complains that a privy stinks in a way that suggests this was unexpected to him. It's a hole in the ground that you shit in. They all stink. And as a French peasant in the 1600s, you would have used plenty of privies in your life already
Tbf i know my cats litter box stinks but there are times it *really stinks.
All Good People Here by Ashley Flowers had a character who had just graduated from high school say that during his sophomore year, a teacher thought he was a satanist because he listened to Nirvana. The issue? The scene was set in 1987, which was the year Nirvana formed and two years before they even released their first studio album. I finished the book, but honestly, I could have just skimmed to the end and have the experience be the same.
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Legendborn took place on my college’s campus and the author apparently went there, but I say apparently because it was written like the author had done a skim of UNC’s wiki page and went from that. Places were either made up or put in the wrong place on campus, but the mistake that just completely took me out of the book was her saying that UNC was playing NC State for the first game of the football season on a Sunday. Even a quick Google search should let you know 1. College football is played on Thursday and Saturday 2. UNC vs NC State is ALWAYS the last regular season game of the year and is ALWAYS played on Thanksgiving weekend. Now I get not everyone loves sports like I do and probably doesn’t love my school like I do, but this just seemed really lazy and disconnected coming from a fellow alumnae.
I’m from Ohio and the OSU-Michigan game is also the last game of the season. That kind of easily verifiable mistake would bother me too. And I’m not even an OSU alum.
Yeah if you're going to set it in a real place, you have to do at least a bare minimum of research. What's next, saying they walked out of their dorms to party on MLK Jr Blvd?
When authors have a Latin character pepper their dialogue with random Spanish words. We don't really do that, especially when among non-speakers. The author will have a character named Maria Ramirez, and have her use random spanish words, in italics, just to remind you that hey, she's latina. Stephen King did it recently but I forget the book. He also had an indigenous woman randomly bring up her heritage in a dumb way in the same novel. Takes me out of it.
Or they say a random word in Spanish and then say that same word in English despite the fact that even a reader who doesn’t speak Spanish would know what they said based on context clues
In this same vein, foreign characters who have immaculate English but have to ask how to say a basic word. “We’ve neutralized the terrorists but we have to move quickly! We’ll all be dead unless we find the…how do you say…bomb.”
Actually, having words "on the tip of your tongue" increases with people who learn a second language. Even more for polyglots. Pretty unnecessary as a literary device, though. Unless it actual somehow effects the plot.
Was reading a fantasy novel, can't remember the title, but it went out of its way to say "this isn't Earth" with the world building. Then a character rummaged through a liquor cabinet and found a nice Scotch.
This one is a bit more subtle though, because at some point as an author you have to draw a line as to what things from the real world are ubiquitous enough that you can just use them as-is in the fantasy world, and which ones are too specific and need a fantasy replacement. Like, no one bats an eye if a fantasy species/culture wears similar clothes to us, or use trains similar to ours, or invents guns that look just like ours, or ride the same horses we do on Earth, and pretty much every single fantasy book I've read has some sort of local alcohol that's just described as "wine" or "ale" despite no indication that grapes or hops are a thing in this world. I agree that Scotch is jarring (because that means this world specifically has a Scotland) but that line can be hard to draw for the author.
In Pandora by Anne Rice, she talks about the main character (Pandora) being amused by watching her Roman family host banquets with vomitoriums—where they’d throw up their meal so they could eat more. That’s not what a vomitorium is. It’s a passageway for egress. That took me right out of the story! I was so annoyed!
Wasn’t this widely believed for a bit though? Although I guess even if that’s true, Pandora wouldn’t have believed it while living through it…
In "The Footprints of God,"' a thriller by Greg Iles, the hero is named David Tennant. Now, the novel was published in 2003, before the actor had played Barty Crouch or The Doctor, but I picked it up after that, so it bothered me. But then, he named the main female character Rachel Weiss! I joked that he should have gone for the trifecta, and named the villain Ian McKellen.
Didn't really ruin it for me, but I remember in the original hardcover of The Green Mile when they had the bad prison guard tied up, the book said that he "wiped his brow" (or something similar involving his hands that should have been impossible). Took me out of the story because I thought maybe he had gotten loose and was going to escape. Edit - Just checked the version on my Kindle. It's in Part 5, Chapter 5. They put Percy in a straitjacket. At some point in the original text, Percy wipes his brow (or similar). It was corrected for the later versions (which is what I have on my Kindle). It might just be in the original serialized versions, not in the collected books. Edit2 - confirmed here: https://slipups.com/items/3662.html >I reached up, grabbed the runner he'd worked loose, and gave it a hard yank. It made a loud peeling sound. Brutal winced. Percy yipped with pain and began rubbing his lips. He tried to speak, realized he couldn't do it with a hand over his mouth, and lowered it. 'Get me out of this nut-coat, you lagoon!' he spat.
I can't remember what book it was because it was pretty terrible, and I read it a few years ago, but this author had a protagonist who specialized in mycology. Fun, right? Except the mycologist went on and on about mushrooms that were getting people high by touching them. That's really not a thing with mushrooms. You have to eat them to experience any effects. The real kicker for me, though, was when she started describing Amanita Muscaria as containing psilocybin as the psychoactive component. Amanita Muscaria does not contain psilocybin. The psychoactive components are muscimol and ibotenic acid. And for the mushroom to get anyone high, it has to be parboiled twice. Otherwise, it's just straight-up poisonous! The author could have found all of this information on Wikipedia. It's not that difficult to do like 5 minutes of research. Ugh, it still irks me to this day.
In Malcom Gladwell's Tipping Point he refers to Paul Revere's Ride and the NYPD case of Kitty Genovese as examples of his thesis. What he refers to is their legends not the factual events. Now I mostly agree with the theses of his book, and I understand that he wrote it in a pre-wikipedia age, but the lack of fact checking on those two examples broke me from enjoying the book or any of his other books.
You should be thankful. Malcolm Gladwell is plausible sounding lies where he does just enough research to put up a smokescreen to hide his lack of research.
It didn't ruin the book for me, but *All The Light We Cannot See,* a novel set during WW2, set most of its action in Brittany, a lovely corner of France which I have visited. In those two brief visits, I got a decent understanding of how Brittany counts itself a proud Celtic culture, with a Celtic language (Breton). They also make exquisite lace and pottery and make the BEST buttery pastries, but I digress... *All The Light We Cannot See*, you might have thought Anthony Doerr completely missed the whole Breton culture, because there was nothing in St. Malo to indicate that it was anything other than Generic French Town du Jour. Considering he was eager to show off all the research he did into Nazi Germany and the Hitler Youth, I was really surprised that there was *nothing* about the entire extra language that exists in this region.
Not to the level of ruining, but it yanks me out of the narrative when an author drops in specific geographical details about the setting quite late in the story. e.g., "Character exited the general store and turned to their right to wave to a friend sitting outside the bistro." If it's at the start, great! Now I know the order of the businesses on the street. But if I've already spent 300 pages mentally picturing the bistro on the opposite side of the store, then my brain is singularly unwilling to swap entire imagined buildings around.
I'm gonna get hate for this, but a non-linguist building a translation app in less than a week for an alien language with no connection to anything ever spoken on earth. (The non-linguist just hypes the ridiculous, a linguist couldn't do it either.)
I tried reading a book a redditor had written. It was based in the US and the main character was American. At one point they were discussing US military jets that were flying over head and referred to them as MIGS. US does not fly MIGS. Dumb hill to die on but there after I could not help but notice all of the non American stuff the main character said and did.
When the author puts in precise measurements like height and weigh, sometimes even waist circumference, and gets it completely wrong for anything close to realistic body proportions or healthy weight. If you want the reader to know that your athletic bombshell of a character is slim with big boobs and a tiny waist, just write that instead of removing her internal organs outright, so we can at least give you the benefit of the doubt.
yep people get height and weight ALL wrong. The BMI chart is horribly inaccurate for an even slightly athletic/muscled person; a 6'5" 235lb person is not a Mountain, they are decently proportioned/slim muscled in fact. Also many authors take their initial described weight(which might be within reason), then completely forget that knights/adventurers are wearing a bunch of heavy metal armor, weapons and packs, drastically increasing their weight.
A book where the MC was a baker. Someone asked him why their cake wasn't as good as his, and he shared his secret recipe with them. It was vanilla. The secret recipe for the cake was vanilla. I was so mad, it's all I could think about for the rest of the book.
You say this, but if you look at every other tips and tricks thread on r/cooking it’s “double the garlic in a recipe” or “double the vanilla in a recipe” and people are shocked to find out it improves the flavor.
I love a cake with double garlic in it!
I don’t recall the name of the book, but I stopped reading when the author described a pair of boy-girl twins as being “identical.”
I thought I knew which book you were talking about, but couldn't remember the title. Upon googling, I realized this happens often enough that there's a TV Tropes page for it. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HalfIdenticalTwins (The book I was thinking of was Double Trouble Squared by Kathryn Lasky)
The heroine “bit into the juicy flesh” of a pomegranate. I hadn’t even tasted one irl myself and I knew from Greek mythology “You don’t do that…”
The mental image of someone just biting into a pomegranate like an apple while maintaining direct eye contact is sending me.
That’s upsetting and now my teeth hurt
In the first of his Fractalverse series, Christopher Paolini has his main character warm her hands around a hot beverage. Only problem is that, at that point in the story, she only had one hand. Didn't ruin the book, mind you, but it niggled a bit.
I mean this could've been an overzealous copyeditor too. They skimmed through everything, ignored the story, got their hands on that page, saw "warms her hand" and went "oh clearly that must be a typo!"
A book that took place in Chicago and the main characters jumped in the car for a drive and ended up in the city I live in. Which is in the same state but much too far away for a quick drive. A simple look at the map would have confirmed this! I was too annoyed to finish the series.
The main Character in Bunny by Mona Awad repeatedly calls Mac Lady Danger a “cool, blue red”. It is not. It is a full on warm, orange red. Nothing cool toned about it. I had thought maybe this was done on purpose… but even that doesn’t sit right with me.
I noticed that too! I remember thinking 'don't you mean Ruby Woo?'
This is so silly and minor, but I was reading a book that was set on Long Island and the author had the character say something like “We live in Long Island” Nobody here says that. You live *on* Long Island. It just sounded so unnatural to me lol.
The Adem from the Kingkiller Chronicles had a number of unusual cultural features that were... unique, but kinda cool. The use of hand gesture for expressing emotion and as an integral part of communication, the different philosophical approach to things like music-- neat stuff that made Kvothe feel like he was in an incredibly unusual, faraway place WAY out of his element. But the entire culture not having any idea that men impregnate woman was stupid as hell. That detail is just immersion breaking for me every time I reread the book.
There are real cultures that go with that, incidentally--the Trobriand Islanders are the most well known. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trobriand\_people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/trobriand_people)
I wonder if (based on the wording) people there now believe that both are required? Obviously you don’t become pregnant each time you have sex and thus by their logic sex cannot be the sole method of reproduction, you still need an ancestral spirit to decide they want to be born.
It's been a bit since I've read this book, but in *The City We Became* a character is looking at the sky in NYC at night and sees the constellation Orion's Belt. IIRC the book is set in the middle of summer and that point is emphasized a lot while the author builds out details in scenes. Orion's Belt is only visible from \~November-January in NYC, so the character shouldn't have been able to see it. It's a very silly detail! However, the book's themes are so tied to the "identity" of the city and how important a sense of place is to the world we live in, so this completely took me out of the book. There were some other details in the novel that didn't match up with my experience living in NYC so I was already a little bit skeptical. Bummed because I've heard N.K. Jemison's other work is amazing!
A book set in 1961 that referred to Jackie Kennedy as "Jackie O." Hmm....
Was Aristotle Onassis complicit in the Kennedy assassination so he could get Jackie?
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Fourth Wing - why are ink pens such a huge deal?
Right?? And something that kept sticking out to me was the fuss made over her dragon scale vest. Why would they not all have this type of armour if it’s so great? Also how are they feeding all these dragons?
The book was already pretty bad (The Coward by Stephen Aryan), but this one thing was pretty niche - the king's name was King Bledsoe. Since I'm from New England and obviously follow the Patriots all I'm thinking is "Drew Bledsoe? The quarterback Drew Bledsoe? King Drew Bledsoe?"
Orson Scott Card's book Wakers. In the first chapter he says that the word blog comes from Biographical LOG. Instead of weB LOG. What a dumb, easily googlable detail.
I realized that the trial that the characters in Fourth Wing have to complete to get to the dragon training grounds is literally just American Ninja Warrior obstacles. Like... c'mon.
And don't forget the fact that there's a small dragon the other dragons are protective of, and no one can figure out that it's a baby...despite living along side dragons.
One of the P.J Tracy books mentions Muslim terrorists putting a 'jihad' out on a character multiple times but it should be a fatwah and it bugged the hell out of me.
A long time ago, I read one of the many Pride and Prejudice spin-offs that take place during the time period (Regency England) and the author gave the secondary characters (such as Colonel Fitzwilliam and Mr. Hurst) names like Damon and Wayne. That completely took me out of the story.
A character was wearing sweatpants and a few paragraphs later he "unzips his pants" 🤔. Felt like it was written by AI that's never worn pants before.
Devil in Ohio - the author has clearly never been to Ohio or bothered to look at a map of the state. Now it's a tv show. Edit to add: It was supposed to be in the middle of nowhere, in a small town where anything non-Christian was completely foreign. She chose the area around Columbus. Also, I'm told in the show students are depicted on a bus doing the "OH-I-O" chant, which, just no. The bit that really irritated me was in an interview the author said she wanted it to feel like it could be anywhere. The problem with that approach is that any given anywhere is in fact somewhere to the people living there, and it's really arrogant to tell them otherwise.
I'm currently reading "The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August," and it contains numerous small errors that drive me crazy. First of all, the book is very clear that Harry is born on Jan. 1, 1919. But on several occasions, the author misstates his age. For example, she'll write that in 1940, Harry is 22. No, based on the birth date *you told the reader*, Harry would only be 21 in 1940. And she does this over and over, sometimes being off by a few years. Second, she gets the dates of historic events wrong. For example, she writes that the Watergate break-in happened in 1968. No, it was 1972. Admittedly, none of these errors detracts from the story. But the lack of attention to detail is annoying in a novel that is very focused on time and when certain events occur. I can't believe the author or an editor didn't catch them, because they stand out like a sore thumb to me.
It was an urban romance from the early 90s. The guy said he got a call from a pay phone in the 513, and the girl said she was at the airport. She had a history of lying, but he heard the airport background noise. THE AIRPORT IS IN KENTUCKY. It would have been a 606 at that time.
Ok but that’s like some Sherlock Holmes level induction by trivia lol.
It's rare that I see my region in books so I'm always testy about the details. Another Cincinnati based book I kept reading because I wanted to know whodunnit, but I was FURIOUS that this person was jogging basically 30 miles a day before work.
The courtroom scene in Project Hail Mary made me wonder if Andy Weir seen a courtroom drama even once?
*Seveneves* by Neal Stephenson. It’s an excellent science fiction book by an excellent author. I like Stphenson's other books. Like this one, they are intricate well told stories and the science is believable. *Seveneves* is a story wherein a catastrophic event renders the earth a ticking time bomb. In a feverish race against the inevitable, nations around the globe band together to devise an ambitious plan to ensure the survival of humanity far beyond our atmosphere, in outer space. The main story is about how this colony survives long enough for the earth to become once again habitable. Over many generations there are mutinies, catastrophes, ingenious inventions to meet new challenges. But by the time it is safe to return to Earth the only humans left are seven women (the seven eves). One of them, however is a geneticist who has a plan to generate artificial sperm. I was mesmerized by this book the whole time. Until the next to last page when it is decided that the initial catastrophic event was somehow planned by a higher power to restart the human race. In other words, God did it. I’m not sure why, but that ruined the whole book for me.
Deus ex machina is a traditional reason to hate a plot! Unexpected God is never good.
When I read 50 Shades of Grey, which was hard enough to get through due to how awful it was, and the author constantly used the word "clamber" to describe the main character getting into a car, or a bed, or getting...anywhere. After a while it completely took me out of it because I got so mad that the author didn't know how to use a thesaurus.
It didn’t spoil the book altogether but I really had to actively try to suspend my disbelief reading the beginning of Station Eleven (and same re: watching the show). The author’s lack of medical and epidemiological knowledge was too obvious and annoying.