Mistakes in books. Have you ever found one?

[sirinrob]

I do tend to expect no errors when reading a book so if i come across a grammar or spelling error im a bit annoyed. Obviously not enough to raise my blood pressure or anything, but still- proof reading should be taken seriously.

 

If a book was riddled with errors i would simply stop reading it as its not my job to scan novels for errors, someone else should have done that.

 

Well thats the stance I take, tried to read some awful books occasionally only to dispatch them to the recycle bin.

[Kell]

I've found that the more obscure in terms of market presence, the better the proofreading/ editorship tends to be.

Funny, that, isn't it? You'd expect the big publishing houses who are pumping out the bestsellers to be able to afford good proofreaders, yet it's the small independents with limited printruns that seem to take more time and care (in general terms - not in every case).

 

I've actually been pleasantly surprised by a couple of self-published novels where I don't think I noticed even a single error - those are the ones where you might expect more to get through (no offence to self-publishers, but when you do it ALL yourself, your eyes must become accustomed to seeing the same things over and over again so things occasionally get missed - those that get the help of others for proofreading would probably fare a little better - again, in general terms!).

[Janet]

In East of the Sun by Julia Gregson there are a couple of obvious mistakes, including the reference on page 102 of someone being like a villain in an Abbott and Costello film. This book is set in 1928/29 and yet Abbott and Costello didn’t work together until 1935!

 

Another (page 106) talks about a parlour game “in which you wrote the name of somebody famous on a strip of paper and stuck it on your forehead. The others had to guess who you were”.

 

Er, no - they could tell who you are by reading the paper stuck on your forehead!

[Univerze]

Ugh, so very often. Spelling mistakes are stupid enough, to have gotten through. But I often buy the first available edition for any Laurell Hamilton book, but these often have a lot of mistakes. One I most remember, is that in the first book of the Merry Gentry series I think it was, Nicca is described to have purple hair, or lavender or something, while later on when he starts playing a larger part, he's suddely all in shaded of brown, brown hair, skin etc (these books deal with fairies, so hence the hair and skin colors).

And these mistakes happen often, or you know, the lead character acting like she's unfamiliar with someone, while in the previous book they shared a steamy lovescene. That one was particularly annoying. *sighs*

Lots of writing, not enough proofreading?

[AbielleRose]

I've noticed in the Sookie Stackhouse series by Charlaine Harris that she tends to mess up her character's names a bit. In several of the books she has refered to 'Claudine' as 'Claudia' or even 'Claudette'. There are two other characters called Claud and (I believe) Claudette so I always reread those parts to make sure I'm not just misunderstanding which character she is refering to, but no. She actually does mess up her name quite a bit. One book was so full of name errors that I came close to not finishing it!

[Nicola]

I've noticed that too Cali. It's a bit disorientating wondering who this Claudia lady is

[chesilbeach]

I've noticed in the Sookie Stackhouse series by Charlaine Harris that she tends to mess up her character's names a bit. In several of the books she has refered to 'Claudine' as 'Claudia' or even 'Claudette'. There are two other characters called Claud and (I believe) Claudette so I always reread those parts to make sure I'm not just misunderstanding which character she is refering to, but no. She actually does mess up her name quite a bit. One book was so full of name errors that I came close to not finishing it!

 

I don't remember seeing her referred to as Claudia, but Claudette is a separate character from Claudine. She's

Claude and Claudine's sister, they are triplets not twins, but this isn't revealed until the later stories, so I've spoiler tagged this for anyone who hasn't read them all.

 

[Ruth]

I read a book where a main character's name changed halfway through once! Also, in The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets, one character is described as wearing trousers, and then within a couple of pages (without changing scene), she was wearing a skirt.

 

I've seen loads of typos and grammatical mistakes in books; it doesn't bother me unless there are lots of them throughout the book.

[Ooshie]

I've just had the flow of my reading interrupted by the word "glad" being wrongly spelled "gald". It is trivial, I know, but it jarred me right out of my reading world and will take me a wee while to get back into it.

[Coffin Nail]

I've come across the odd spelling mistake every now and again, I just roll my eyes and wish I could have a job proofing.

 

The last one was in Val McDermid's Fever of the Bone. There was a they've instead of a they're.

[BookJumper]

I find them all the time. They irk me to no end and also make me wish someone would give me a proofreading job. The latest was a mixup between 'to' and 'too' in Jasper Fforde's Shades of Grey.

[Janet]

I suppose the problem is that our brains are conditioned to read what we expect something to say. I think it must make proof-reading very difficult. There is a paragraph that often does the round in emails which highlights this.

 

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, olny taht the frist and lsat ltteres are at the rghit pcleas. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by ilstef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

I don't mind the odd typo (as long as it's not constant) - it's more factual errors that annoy me.

 

I did get annoyed with Jon McGregor in If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things and his use of ‘thank you’ throughout the novel (apart from one incident which I noticed where thank you was used). Similarly ‘carpark’ and plenty of other incidents of bad writing (or editing?). I found I was almost concentrating on trying to spot them rather than reading the story at times.

[jankensan]

Can I just state the obvious that the Da Vinci Code is FICTION. It is housed in the FICTION section, alongside other FICTION books.

That is all, thanks for reading.

[Kate]

I've come across the odd spelling mistake every now and again, I just roll my eyes and wish I could have a job proofing.

 

I do exactly the same!

[iamnotreal]

I'm currently reading Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury and there seems to be random apostrophes showing up at the end of sentences that aren't dialogue. I keep going back over it thinking that missed the start of a chunk of speech but it always turns out that there was just a random apostrophe/speech mark.

 

I can't think of an example right now but I'll keep an eye out.

[sirinrob]

I'm currently reading Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury and there seems to be random apostrophes showing up at the end of sentences that aren't dialogue. I keep going back over it thinking that missed the start of a chunk of speech but it always turns out that there was just a random apostrophe/speech mark.

 

I can't think of an example right now but I'll keep an eye out.

 

That sounds a bit strange. Be interested if you can find an example.

[Luthien]

I haven't found too many in English books, actually. But that's probably because it's not my first language. I suppose I just don't notice some mistakes. What often really bothers me is a horrible German translation, when sometimes translators apparently do not know the English word and translate it with whatever comes first in their dictionary. I know it's not an easy job, especially with languages so different as English and German, but it annoys me anyway.

[BookJumper]

English and German are actually closer than you'd think in terms of grammar (which is why The Sound of Music translated in German worked, and translated in Italian sucked immensely ), so German translators have less excuses than most not to be as faithful as possible. Some finery will always be lost in translation but still, one must do one's best.

[Luthien]

Maybe the grammar is similar (though I find English grammar way easier - I wouldn't want to learn German!) but I think it's quite hard to get a feeling for the translation and doing an appropriate job with the German version of a text. The problem often is not that the translation is wrong, but that it's not quite to the point and I think a lot of what the author originally intended to say is often lost in translation. But I did not mean to say that all German translations suck, most of them are quite good or at least okay. Still, reading the original book is a whole other story.

[sirinrob]

I have a similar problem with English translations of German books, most but not all have a flatness to them and its noticeable. Whenever I can I read the German original, then at least I can judge the book on its merits as far as that's possible.

 

To a certain extent I agree that English and German are fairly close grammatically, but there are subtle differences like the ability to swap subject and object, under certain conditions to change the emphasis in a sentence whilst retaining the semantics. You can do the same in English, but you change the semantics in doing so more often than not. Verb usage is distinctly different between the two languages, both tense usage and formation ( think separable prefixes in German;) ).

Edited April 9, 2010 by sirinrob

[Kylie]

My current book has terrible use of punctuation. There are a lot of commas where there should be full stops or semi-colons. It makes no sense to have a comma in that particular place and it's very jarring.

[BookJumper]

Ugh, Kylie - that would send me right up the wall, down again and right through the roof!

[Kreader]

I've re-read two Anne McCaffrey books in a series. She has a character learning to read and write English from scratch and in the following book she's forgotten that the character has already learnt this. She again has him learning to read and write English starting from the alphabet and marvels how fast he's done it. That's definitely a problem with continuity in a series.

[poppyshake]

In 'Temeraire' there is a paragraph which makes perfect sense to the story, but then a page later, obviously by mistake, it turns up again in full and makes no sense at all. Sloppy in the extreme.

I am rubbish at punctuation, so I probably wouldn't notice if there were mistakes of that nature.

[corina]

I know this is more a problem with translation but in After Dark by Haruku Murakami the girl eats a 'vegetable sandwich'. I can imagine pumpkin and cabbage between the bread.

 

(I know, this is a bit picky)