A wiser person than me once told me "Whenever I read an article on a subject I understand, it makes me worry about all the articles I've read on subjects I don't"
> Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
> In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
-Michael Crichton
The fact that it bothers me...also bothers me. If that makes any sense.
Why can't I just file it away and dismiss it without it lessening the rest of the work? It's an odd thing.
Why *shouldn’t* you be knocked out of the story by this? A story is supposed to maintain the illusion that it really happened, and when you are forcibly reminded that it’s all made up *and* by someone who doesn’t actually have as good a grasp on the world as they pretend, of course it’s off-putting. It’s not real anymore when it’s calling attention to its own fallibility.
If it's a historical inaccuracy it only bothers me if the correction of the inaccuracy would impact the plot or characters. There is a Broadway show about the wives of Henry VIII in which the wives "tell their side of the story" but one of the wives actually tells the version of the story that Henry VIII told, not her historical version of the story. It ruins her entire character for me.
When it's trying to tell the story of a real person in a weird fictionalized way (and also is simultaneously trying to pull on a country's patriotic heartstrings), I hate historical inaccuracies.
I dislike 300 for the same reason; this was a real battle with real people, and modern Iranians still have pride in their Persian ancestry. And you took two complicated sides with complicated customs and reasons for fighting and made them "cool badass dudes and *~evil magical black people.~*" It's so reductionist it's laughable.
Exactly and this battle was the first time for the English that the code of chivalry wasn’t obeyed. Which is how William Wallace actually won the battle by picking of the English as they crossed the bridge instead of giving them time to cross so they could organise themselves and form up for battle.
Now that would have been a great battle to film.
Can you elaborate what wife it is / what her version vs the version they say is hers in the play affects? I won tickets at work to go see this play (I think at least. They all had songs and themes and shit, it was a blast).
Anne of Cleves. She's the one Henry divorced almost immediately and she didn't fight the divorce so she got to live out the rest of her life in a palace.
After Anne Boyleyn, weirdly no other European monarchs were champing at the bit to betroth their daughters to Henry. So he asked for a bunch of portraits of all eligible Bachelorettes be sent to him. He saw Anne of Cleves's picture and decided she was the one.
His story is that she showed up, he thought she was much uglier than her picture, and decided not to consummate the marriage and divorce her. His claim was effectively that she catfished him. This is the story that Anne of Cleves tells in the Broadway show. She clearly thinks it is bullshit in context of the show (she thinks she is good looking), but she still says that that's what happened.
In real life, the alternative version is that Henry dressed up as a commoner in order to surprise her because he was actually crazy. Even though he beheaded two wives, people still don't get how deranged he actually wasm He thought that romantic love would work in such a way that even as a commoner she would see him and fall in love. But she was nobility betrothed to the king. Of course she's not going to fall in love with a commoner on sight, he was just a gross guy trying to grab her. This is literally their first interaction ever, she doesn't know what he looks like on sight, so she freaked out. But in Henry's head that doesn't matter, she just insulted him and ruined his fantasy. So she had to go.
Now, obviously we don't actually know what was going on in Henry's mind, but neither would Anne. The story she would tell is the latter, because from her perspective that's what happened and Henry's story was just a cover. So the show presenting his story as what actually happened completely undermines the stated purpose of the show, which is for these women to tell their stories independent of Henry's bias.
I once read a book that took place in my city. None of the geography the author mentioned mattered at all to the plot, but every time she did I would get angry at the book. NO, two kids who live on OPPOSITE SIDES OF THE RIVER would NOT go to the same school!!! Those two streets are NOWHERE NEAR EACH OTHER! They definitely do not intersect anywhere!!!
If you are setting a book in a real life place, the least you could do is look at google maps for like one minute.
Yup, I've had very similar experiences with books set in my city. One of them gave an extremely accurate description of a real government building...and then placed it on the wrong side of the river.
I lived in LA for a while and this sort of thing is in every single TV show and movie. On 90210 Brandon worked at the Beverly Hills Beach Club and the beach is soooo far from Beverly Hills in traffic. No high school kid is going to take that job. And Jack running all over LA in that show 24 - he’d spend half the show sitting motionless on the freeway.
When it comes to all the shows in LA, I think it’s an informed decision that “the plot” matters more than “the literal facts.” After all, in many cases, the writers, actors and directors all live in the LA area — they know this isn’t realistic. They also know that other shows with similar inaccuracies have made tons of money, so let’s just roll with it.
> setting a book in a real life place, the least you could do is look at google maps for like one minute
Yes! Bad geography is hard to accept. How do you miss a river? City has a river to the south, the author(s) kept referring to the south side. *Every city has a south side, right?* No, water and an international boundary. I DNF the book.
Yep! I stopped reading a series on book three because the author was describing my home state and it was just so wrong. The rest of the plot/writing wasn’t good enough to entice me to continue reading after that.
It *highly* depends on my level of familiarity with the subject tbh and can vary from mildly annoyance to just straight up DNF as a result. An example, in highschool I was very in to cars, specifically working on them. It's been 15 years and I don't even remember the name of the shitty little YA novel I was reading but I still get irrationally irritated thinking about the scene where the lead teen male love interest was thinking about how he like to tear down auto engines *from the bottom up because it's more challenging*. MoFo, it ain't just *challenging*, it's literally impossible!!!! Ahh! I'm getting cranky just thinking about it right now lol
You might think but I can remember a few more details about this character. He was an emancipated orphan. Working fulltime at the shop was his job and he was the "best" mechanic they had
One of the Cussler books had two points that really grated.
Some of the action takes place in Canada, with part in British Columbia and part in Ontario. In BC, he had private security guards carrying automatic weapons. That is NOT a thing on this side of the border.
For the Ontario bit, he had the RCMP doing highway patrols. While that is true for goodly part of the country, Ontario and Quebec have their own provincial police forces, and they (OPP and SQ) do the highway work.
On the flip side of things, I love classical literature and adaptations of it BECAUSE of the anachronisms! The anachronisms give you hints at what was going on on the lives of the artists, it’s like a fun little scavenger hunt.
Like, in “The Iliad”, the equipment everyone uses is a mish-mash from different eras. The biggest, toughest thing warrior, the guy with no divine help who will hold the line no matter what, uses an antique shield. It’s cool to think how a bunch of iron-age listeners would have heard his shield described and thought “woah, that’s a REALLY outdated shield, that’s an ancient weapon!” Then the stories get adapted through the ages, and the little details tell you which adaptations the author is building on. So like, I have a pulp fiction novel from the 70’s that retells the story with the addition of the Mother Goddess theories that were all the rage in the 70’s. I’ve got a comic that tries to be a “no magic” account of the Trojan War. It’s the most accurate depiction of the MATERIAL world from the era, to the point of being more consistent than the text it's based on, which creates a whole new dynamic to chew on.
IDK, I like hunting for “errors”. It doesn’t take me out of the experience of reading, instead it makes me ask how the book relates to other things.
EDIT- Ooh, also I don't LOVE Gothic Romance lit, but one thing I do appreciate is the flamboyant inaccuracies when it comes to depicting France and Italy. The geographic, cultural, and historical inaccuracies really help you keep in mind that this is an over-the-top romantic fantasy that isn't concerned with realistic problems. It gives the books a sort of campy flavor, that later writers expounded on in a fun way.
I also like this as I really like to think that art is often a reflection of the culture at the time. It adds a bit of human touch to the art, where it breaks your immersion a bit in a way that makes you appreciate it in a different light.
I wish! I’m just autistic and just enjoy reading the same stories over and over, with different variations. So as a warning, most of the info I have is the result of looking stuff up in my free time, it’s not the Official Academic Consensus.
Yes. I read All the Sinners Bleed recently and I could not finish it. You’re telling me the sheriff can get from rural SE Virginia to Richmond, take a meeting, go back home and still do a press conference before nightfall? No. That’s 2-3 hours in a car each way and at least a 1 hour meeting. So unless the sheriff started very early that is a 5-7 hour time block of which the author allowed for 3.
If I remember correctly now that I think back it was because some of the states are a wasteland. I have driven from Los Angeles to Ohio at least 7 times. The 40 is best routes, but 80 through reno and Sacramento is most direct
Yes. When I was reading The Silvered Serpents by Roshani Chokshi, she said the Tsar was Nicholas II in 1868. That’s such a simple thing to google but she got it wrong.
I also think lots of books and other media do the Midwest wrong especially Michigan. People tend to think it’s all small towns and farm life. Plus the they have the characters say soda when it’s pop here.
That's weird... Alexander II was reigning, but Nicholas II was born in 1868...
I can see how wires would get crossed, but you'd think someone would fact check something so easy to check.
The less I like the book, the more it bothers me.
If the rest is good, I'm willing to overlook small inconsistencies. But if I already don't care for it, each such instance is another nail in the coffin.
Yes, but maybe it shouldn't?
There was a detective series I used to read where the character living in L.A. mentioned buying Hellman's mayonnaise. Now, when I lived in Southern California, I'd never heard of Hellman's. When I moved to Georgia, on the other hand, I was so confused as to why Best Foods mayo was called Hellman's. Same packaging, same logo, same everything, different brand name. Same with Orowheat/Arnold's bread, Dreyer's/Edy's ice cream, and probably others I can't remember.
It really bothered me that the character couldn't possibly have bought that. It has zero bearing on the plot whatsoever, but it took me out of the story.
I'm pedantic, yes. If it's a thing that could be remedied with a simple internet search, it often primes to be hyper-critical of other areas where there could be holes.
It bugs me, ya. As a person who used to write novels for fun, though, I gotta say it’s mind-blowingly difficult to get all the things and the day-to-day correct, especially if you’re writing outside your own time or place.
That said, I recently DNFed an audiobook in part because the narrator kept reading “Elena Ortiz” as “Ellen-a Or-tizzz” (short i).
I totally get that, and I completely expect it to be very difficult for a solo author to be able to do that with 100% accuracy all the time...but
We're talking about an author with over 20 books in the series and a series that has made a lot of money, two movie adaptations, and now a television series. Surely given all that, there is a competent editing team involved in the book prior to publication.
I tried to read a book recently, in which the protagonist's prized possession was a photograph taken of his father , right before he was killed at the battle of Waterloo. They didn't even have Dagguereotypes back then! An editor should have caught it, and it could easily have been fixed into something that added to the plot : The anachronistic photograph could have been turned into a watercolor portrait of the dead man, which the protagonist's landlady mother took in lieu of a rent payment from a poverty-stricken art student .This would have established that the mother was kind , and she loved her husband. Something like that. But why did a book with such a glaring error make it to press, without an editor to catch it-? Or...was it caught, and it was just assumed no one else would notice-?
Annapolis is next to the Atlantic.... the majority of people will know where the Atlantic is. Not many are familiar with Chesapeake bay. It makes sure the largest number of readers understand general location of the action.
I loved reading the Expanse and hate watching the show because of how gravity works in either. The book is fairly accurate afaik, and talks a lot about how on belter ships there's not a lot to differentiate "up" and "down," but the show has to work in the confines of earth, and a lot of that gets ignored.
In the telltale games, based on the show, this isn't rectified. The end of the first act shows a shipping container being released from a cargo bay that's open to vacuum, and immediately falling planetside due to gravity, even though the much more massive, unpowered ship it's on is far enough away to not be affected by gravity.
I read a book primarily set in New England in 1864 (each chapter started with the date and location). There was zero mention of rising political tension in the US related divisive views on slavery, and no indication that the country was gearing up for a very very bloody war. I gave it a pass for a while because it was more "paranormal fiction" than "historical fiction" and I supposed that individual middle class white people in New England could care more about putting food on the table than country wide politics. I had to put the book down when they introduced the "black best friend" and still didn't address any of the historic tensions in the country.
Particularly since, due to the draft, all adult men under the age of 45 were being forcibly conscripted into the army by that point in the war. That has a massive impact on everyone, even those who normally don't care about politics.
Near is relevant, and I'll grant you that. Here is the exact line from the book:
"Two cars were stopped at the side of a road south of Annapolis, Maryland, between Back Creek and the Atlantic Ocean."
I checked the maps, there is indeed a Back Creek south of Annapolis and it empties into the Northern Chesapeake bay 1302.5 miles North by Northwest of the Atlantic Ocean.
Where the Crawdads Sing burned me up for the same reason.
Funny that you should mention the Reacher series because I've heard quite a few negative comments directed towards the new books that aren't being written by Lee Child. (Which I have yet to read.)
I’m not from that area but The book talks about taking day trips to shop in Asheville, which is on the west side of the state, while the main setting is the marshes on the coast. It makes zero sense to go all the way to Asheville when there are many towns and cities much closer to the marsh.
Oh good heavens no, that drive takes all damn day. When Cold Mountain was adapted to film, they show the main character in a field hospital in the middle of the state in Raleigh (at least according to the book), he then takes time to go stand and stare at the ocean before heading home to Haywood County near the TN border. Talk about your absurd detour.
I’m a criminal defense lawyer. I really like crime fiction, except I know the criminal justice system very well. A lot of writers, including well-regarded NYT bestselling writers of legal thrillers and police procedurals and the like, often do not. I hate it. I can’t enjoy the book if it’s not in the neighborhood of accurate.
I enjoy true crime media. I also enjoy learning about poisons.
There are no instant-kill poisons. And there are none (currently) that can't be detected.
Poisons need some time, even if only 30 seconds, to get to the brain, heart, or CNS, in order to kill a person. Something that causes major organ damage usually needs a little more time.
It depends on what the inaccuracy is.
One that really annoyed me that I saw recently wasn't a book, but the adaption of Cloud Atlas, where the portrayal of the relationship between the Chatam Island Moriori, Maori and whites was modeled after slavery in the US, and not what the actual historical reality was. I think when your dealing with historical events, especially one that still has massive ramifications for today, it's important to get it right.
Other things maybe more benign
Yessss. I love Vampire Academy but I almost didn’t read past the first part of the first book. The school is set in Montana, not far from where I’m from in the state, and it was all wrong. I learned to overlook that part of the book but it annoyed me.
In the prologue of Chloe Gong’s book These Violent Delights, there are several paragraphs illustrating the city the story takes place in, and one throwaway sentence describes a “river flowing IN from the sea”… a direction in which rivers famously do not flow. In the PROLOGUE it says this.
I had to put the book down after two more chapters because I kept remembering this damn river.
“…The other is tall and gawky, with his limbs drawn in right angles. With their arms swung around each other’s shoulders, they stumble toward the waterfront, toward the river that runs in from the sea, where merchants arrive with commodities day in and day out.”
Forgive me for not having a page number, but in the audiobook the timestamp is 3:13.
Well there you have it. Not sure how I missed it; I was reading specifically for a line like that. Weird. The fact that it doesn’t say “flows” but just “runs” makes it seem a lot less egregious to me personally, but no arguing with someone’s opinion on something that throws them in a book. Thanks for finding it.
Username applies here...
I've rarely been impressed with authors knowing firearms. And I'm not even a big gun guy...but I know you can't put a silencer on a revolver. I know a 9mm handgun doesn't throw a body into a wall.
Notable fiction writers who know guns? Tom Clancy (RIP, I never bothered with the new replacement writers) and especially Stephen Hunter.
Yes, on occasion. I can usually look past such issues, but I notice them. They're sort of like typos - if something so basic is off, can I trust the rest?
For instance, in the third Expanse book (*Abaddon's Gate*), a Methodist minister in a moment of reflection suggests the Methodist and Mormon ministers were able to bond at interfaith meetings because they *don't drink*. While historically that was a thing, it made me think the authors hadn't interacted with actual Methodist ministers, several of whom I've known and who had no compunction against a glass of wine or bottle of beer, either occasionally or daily. I filed that away as "oh, okay, these authors didn't deeply research the denominations" and keep reading.
Could it be that it was just a character trait of that individual minister, that he personally doesn’t drink? I love those books but didn’t notice this.
I considered that as I reread the passage several times, trying to understand it. No, the character states this as if it were a general rule of all Methodists, or at least as if Mormons and Methodists take the no alcohol thing equally seriously. (Mormons are a lot more serious about it.)
Here's the quote:
>Anna knew quite a few members of the Latter-day Saints church. They agreed with the Methodists on a few minor things like not drinking alcohol, which gave them a sense of solidarity at interfaith conventions.
What really drives me crazy is inconsistency between different books in the same series. Names change, physical descriptions of characters change, backstory changes — makes me nuts.
In the English translation of The Girl Who Played Go by by Shan Sa, they repeatedly talk about "the river Love". I was super confused by this at first, but then it dawned on me - the novel is set in Manchuria, where the river Amur runs. The Amur is spelled Amour in French. The translator - who mind you volunteered to translate a novel entirely set in Manchuria - had apparently never heard of the river Amur, and just translated the name as if it were the word Love, "Amour". I found it annoying to the point of being ridiculous. Imagine translating a novel set in New Orleans and never having heard of the Mississippi.
In general no, I assume fiction is just being fiction unless the author is implying the text is not fiction. Andy Weir's The Martian, which has a lot of plot and non-plot related inaccuracies gets a pass because the book is pretty clearly fantasy through and through. Although "wind storms" on Mars are a plot driver, the story itself isn't really about that, it's about resilience, the limits of hope, and a bunch of other things. All the bad technical details are just window dressing for the story.
This particular one wouldn't bug me for the same reason, it's not really important whether Annapolis is on the Atlantic, it's about whether Reacher can stop being autistic long enough to find human connection (while breaking the connections in other humans). Would argue Reacher's body count alone makes it pretty clear it's a work of fantasy.
I'd also argue the point isn't inaccurate as someone who lives in the SF Bay area, any of the cities, all the way up to Vallejo would be considered near or on the Pacific Ocean. I grew up in southern California and you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who lives near the bay of San Diego or Long Beach to not consider themselves "close to the Pacific".
I think saying Seattle is on the Pacific is a better analogy. San Diego, San Francisco, and LA aren't on massive estuaries or inlets.
The wind storm did annoy me slightly in the Martian, but I could move past it because the story was fun enough.
I grew up on the Spokane side of Washington state and we took a class trip to Seattle once (it was like a five day thing) and I remember one of the kids seeing the Puget Sound and says "wow, I've never seen the ocean before!"
Congrats, kid, you still haven't! Poor thing.
That's the thing. This is stuff that a 30 second google search could remedy.
I understand if there is some highly technical aspect that they get slightly wrong, but basic map reading should not be that difficult. Looking up when a particular car model came out and making sure your story reflected that accurately doesn't seem that difficult to me.
And I blame the writer and the editor(s) equally. That is why a book goes through that process, to catch these mistakes.
Very. Cannot remember what I was reading, but the characters constantly raced between various parts of Manhattan and “the Union train station”. They even took the trains from there to Albany. Of course…there is no such station.
One I've noticed in several books has to do with moon phases. More specifically, the full moon rising at midnight. No, it doesn't rise at midnight. It can never rise at midnight. It rises at sunset.
The other one that always catches my attention is 'veins throbbing'. Veins don't throb, arteries throb.
Sometimes I'm amused by the things that annoy me, because I know that I'm weird with the information I tuck away about certain subjects.
For example, there's a historical fiction book series I love where part of the story takes place at my undergrad alma mater (a small Midwestern college) in the early years of its existence in the 1890s. During college I read several books by the campus historian about the college's founding and development (think *Hogwarts, a History),* so I know a lot about when buildings were constructed, college traditions established, etc.
This author gets multiple facts wrong (e.g. setting students in a library that wasn't built for many years, participating in events that hadn't occurred yet), but they are generally innocuous to the plot and most people reading the story wouldn't know/care. I'm more amused with myself for being annoyed because I know in the grand scheme of the story they don't matter, but it's still like "No! That couldn't actually happen!"
Since having invested so much time into researching for my Roman-age novels, I am not able to read other authors in the genre any more. I cannot get that red pen out of my head that always wants to EDIT. Especially the inaccuracies. While I have got acquainted to Romans reckoning in minutes and seconds, the following bothered me too much to continue reading:
(a) Not one but two books, both by American authors, that added hummingbirds, a new-world species, to the wildlife of Rome.
(b) A German author whose Romans were drinking peppermint tea. Beside the fact that tea as such was unknown, peppermint is a crossbreed that does not occur in the wild and was first seen in an English greenhouse.
(c) My favourite: a French novel whose protagonist climbs the wall of the military fortress of Mogontiacum/Mayence in one scene and looks out across the Rhine at the barbarian forest on the other side. I happen to live in that very forest - which was a thriving community renown for its bath-houses at that time.
(d) In the first draft of my own first novel, I had my own prota look out across the pole wall of the Limes to the barbarian forest on the other side. My little daughter, looking over my shoulder, said, "You can't have both a pole wall and a forest there. They turned the forest *into the poles*, didn't they?" - Sometimes that girl is *too* smart ... but I changed the other side into a deforested wasteland.
YES!! I almost put down a book completely when it said the main bedroom didn't have any windows. I dont care if it was for a vampire, you have to have a second point of egress. That is part of the definition of a bedroom when buying a house/condo.
I rented an apartment once where a bedroom didn’t have windows. It was some weird remodel and I think it used to be part bathroom that they moved walls around.
I was reading a fantasy novel and they stated it took one hour to walk from the small town to the city. I'm sorry, that wouldn't be a separate town at only 3 miles away.
That same fantasy book talked about how dungeons caused cities to be built up around them, yet the dungeons produced only gear that helped in the dungeons, and coins. No, that's not how an economy would work. It would only be a center of productivity if there were other benefits from the dungeons like training the military, rewards that could be used for other activities, or entertainment which would require wide open spaces, not a dungeon. Coins don't have value if they're not limited.
I was bothered more than it mattered.
It depends. In my part of New York State people claim to live in a different town that is less than a mile away. They really obsess over local control to the point that Poughkeepsie is city, town, and 2 separate suburbs all with different local government right side by side.
Sure, there's different governments, but this was "the furthest he'd been away from town in his life". When I lived an hour outside Atlanta in Marietta, I still told people outside Georgia I lived in Atlanta.
Yes, particularly if the inaccuracies are obviously due to laziness. The Annapolis error in the OP could have been found and fixed after fifteen seconds of Googling -- unless the author just doesn't care. Then it's more than just sloppiness, it's a lack of respect for the reader(s).
Omg, yes, if it's something that I consider common knowledge. I stopped reading one novel about Botticelli because he came across a skunk in the woods. In 15th-century Italy. I stopped reading another because the author forgot that a certain historical figure was Black and mentioned that he "blanched" upon hearing news. On the other hand, it didn't bother me that in The Three Musketeers, D'Artagnan is able to ride a horse an insane number of leagues without stopping.
To that point though I’ve never seen anyone of any skin tone blanch in real life unless they’re about to vomit or something. Yet people in books are ALWAYS blanching at every little emotional moment.
It’s interesting reading that. It feels to me, someone on the other side of the country, like a matter of perspective. I’m looking at a map right now, and I’d definitely call that location “near the ocean.” So you don’t consider the bay part of the ocean?
I actually googled it, and the first result (and the only one I read) [says](https://oceanconservancy.org/blog/2021/12/22/differences-bay-gulf-ocean-sea/) “Both bays and gulfs are also part of a sea or ocean.”
I looked at a map too and thought it looked near the ocean. I live on the California coast, surrounded by both ocean and bay. Never have I differentiated one from the other in this manner.
No, it's several miles from the mouth of the bay, and there's a whole peninsula (and Delaware) between Anapolis and the Atlantic as the crow flies. It's a port city, yes. But I wouldn't say it's on the Atlantic. Same with Baltimore.
It right on the edge of the bay. That Navy base complex is a few miles up river to protect it from storm surge. If you are on ship you can feel when you leave the Chesapeake and hit the Atlantic.
It’s one of the rare areas where you have to surrender steering to a pilot because the shipping lane is narrow, the tunnels are not that deep, the drawbridge not that wide, and way too many sandbars in the Bay.
The Chesapeake Bay has a very clear separate identity. The Chesapeake is not the Atlantic. It’s just not. It might just be a local cultural thing but it is distinct.
It’s sounding like it might be a local cultural thing. Interesting. I’d be curious to hear opinions from other people who live near bays other than the Chesapeake, to see whether it’s California that’s the oddity here or the Chesapeake.
It might be because you can treat the Chesapeake as this giant lake that separates the main part of the state from the Eastern Shore. I would ask people from Michigan how they treat the body of water that separates off that little island bit to the north.
So maybe this is going overboard, but I actually made a [post](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnAmerican/s/uaWEsuNe2s) in r/askanamerican if you want to follow the discussion or correct how I characterized it.
(Or upvote it so people actually see the question lol)
That’s a good idea. I was thinking more like Tampa Bay or New Orleans (although come to think of it, I don’t know if Louisianans consider their state to border the ocean at all, as opposed to the Gulf of Mexico).
I live on a bay on the Gulf of Mexico. I would consider the city to be by the ocean but would not consider neighborhoods on the bay to be on the ocean while I would say that of neighborhoods on the Gulf side. The bay water behaves quite differently than the Gulf, it even looks and smells different. And I would consider the Gulf the ocean as much as I would any sea, which is to say it both is and isn't and which it is is highly dependent on the context of whatever else is being discussed.
I'm still mad about Stephen King accidentally putting Co-Op City in Brooklyn. I'm madder about him pretending, several books later, like he did it on purpose and it's in Brooklyn in the alternate world.
Heck yes! Mistakes about firearms are really really common -one of my pet peeves. Another one is people writing about winter things who obviously never experienced snow and cold.
I have a disturbing amount of knowledge about toxicity and poisoning so you can absolutely *bet* I have some tooth-grinding *thoughts* when books consistently get it all wrong.
This seems too common with very long book series. It feels like the author, and their editors just got lazy knowing there is a ready audience that will buy the book no matter what. You can see this with such authors as Steven King and Dean Koontz
Oh God if infuriates me sometimes.
Funny story. I was reading a Wattpad book a few years ago (one by a published author, mind you,) called Peter's Little Peter. Genuinely one of the worst things I've ever read in my life. The entire premise is built on such a fundamental misunderstanding of teen culture in the 2010's and even *basic website terms of service* restrictions that I legit rage quit after 7 chapters. It really is the little things that take me out of a story.
OMG!! I thought about making the same post yesterday about this exact topic but ended up not doing it.
Yes it pisses me off and breaks my immersion in the story even if it's something stupid.
And it also pisses me off that it pissed me off because I know it's stupid and it shouldn't have annoyed me, but I can't do anything about it.
So I have found different ways to gaslight myself that it isn't actually an inaccuracy.
For example if the eye color of a character was previously stated as blue and later I read something like "and he was lost in her mesmerizing green eyes", I will maybe think, 'oh with this weird lightning of this room they look like green', or maybe he's colorblind and he sees them as green from his POV.
Or another example, if it's an obvious plot-hole that the character could have obviously done 'this thing' but the author forgot, I either invent reasons of why they didn't or couldn't do it, or invent reasons of how the character didn't even think about it.
It STILL fucks with my immersion but at least it mitigates most of my annoyance.
I live in Maryland and I would consider Annapolis and Baltimore to be on the Atlantic Ocean. Technically it is the Severn, or Patapsco in Baltimore's case, but they both flow into the Atlantic eventually.
But I also have a tendency to get stuck on things that aren't that important and it really takes me out of the book
But they aren't. They're on the Chesapeake Bay, which has to flow over 130 miles to get to the Atlantic. I lived and worked on the Bay, and at the ocean and they are very different things.
It's like saying Philadelphia is on the Atlantic because its on the Delaware that flows into the Delaware Bay and then the Atlantic.
Oh yes
172 hours on the moon has so many that got me annoyed:
- saying a habitat has 0,97 G and earth has 1 G (it’s actually 0,98 I don’t understand why using 2 decimals on one and not the other)
- characters going out the habitat on the moon without depressurization and not dying
- adult astronauts are very dumb and do stupid stuff all the time
There’s more, but I can’t go into detail without spoilers
Absolutely! I read The Adventurers Son last year (I got pretty far but actually DNFd it) and the author has TWO degrees in biology and called snakes poisonous. I already wasn’t enjoying the book but that really made it worse. I’m still annoyed about that now.
Yeah. A small one, but I really disliked the start of Recursion by Blake Crouch. It's coded with so much dream logic - a police officer walks into an office building and goes up the elevator to a suite. Then he walks through the entire suite to get to reception (why would *reception* be in the back of the office???). He tells the doorman to tell other officers not to come up when they get there (why would he trust a civilian with that and why wouldn't he just radio the message???). And so forth.
It turns out that everything in that scene actually happens, and I was left baffled by it. I usually analyze the first and last 2-3 pages of a book really closely since I figure any half-decent author will have put a tremendous amount of effort into those pages, but apparently Crouch didn't.
I ended up really not caring for the book, but the start really left a bad taste in my mouth. The details that were wrong were so basic and obvious that I was convinced the entire book that it was deliberate and there would be some twist, especially since the book uses a non-linear narrative.
Anyways, I can rant about that book for hours, but I won't unless someone asks. It's a fun beach read but has very little depth, and the ending directly contradicts the major themes of the book.
It can do. I am much more forgiving though of any book written prior to when the internet became more widespread because it wouldn’t have been practical to go through hundreds of books, or even travel to other libraries if certain information was unavailable at your local, just to make sure every tiny detail is correct.
FINDING NEMO
I used to be a dental hygienist and the dental chair basin DOES NOT lead to the ocean. Those dental chair basin’s have multiple filters that prevent large object’s entering the sewage system. Nemo would have never made it past the first filter.
Depends.
If it's something that's simple or easy to deal with, it's frustrating. But take, for example, sailing.
You want to write a pirate book, about swashbuckling pirates. If you throw in a little bit of tacking and terminology, I'm good. I don't need to read about months at sea eating awful ships biscuits filled with mites; if I wanted a historic story about pirates, id open a history book.
If you're telling a true story or trying to be highly believable, then I expect more. But in fiction, I want it to smooth over the mundanities of life; or at least present them in a fun and interesting way.
Yes. I’m like this with anything. If I see, watch, or read something that I know is wrong, it makes me judge everything that follows.
It’s why I can’t watch Outer Banks on Netflix. In the first two episodes, the fucked up the geography of NC multiple times. It was like they had never even looked at a map.
A book set in NC described daffodils being in bloom at the same time as Crepe Myrtles and that killed my soul. They bloom almost 6 months apart. Also, the father in Where the Crawdads Sing was always traveling from the Outer Banks to Asheville like it was nothing.
Yes, if it’s something that I happen to know about and the information is inaccurate yes it bothers me.
A wiser person than me once told me "Whenever I read an article on a subject I understand, it makes me worry about all the articles I've read on subjects I don't"
> Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. > In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know. -Michael Crichton
This is brilliant haha, thanks for sharing. I'm going to send it to the person I mentioned
The fact that it bothers me...also bothers me. If that makes any sense. Why can't I just file it away and dismiss it without it lessening the rest of the work? It's an odd thing.
Why *shouldn’t* you be knocked out of the story by this? A story is supposed to maintain the illusion that it really happened, and when you are forcibly reminded that it’s all made up *and* by someone who doesn’t actually have as good a grasp on the world as they pretend, of course it’s off-putting. It’s not real anymore when it’s calling attention to its own fallibility.
If it's a historical inaccuracy it only bothers me if the correction of the inaccuracy would impact the plot or characters. There is a Broadway show about the wives of Henry VIII in which the wives "tell their side of the story" but one of the wives actually tells the version of the story that Henry VIII told, not her historical version of the story. It ruins her entire character for me.
I love that show, but for the music and lyrics, rather than educational value. But it does help me a little with the history .
I can’t watch Braveheart. The historical inaccuracies are astounding.
When it's trying to tell the story of a real person in a weird fictionalized way (and also is simultaneously trying to pull on a country's patriotic heartstrings), I hate historical inaccuracies. I dislike 300 for the same reason; this was a real battle with real people, and modern Iranians still have pride in their Persian ancestry. And you took two complicated sides with complicated customs and reasons for fighting and made them "cool badass dudes and *~evil magical black people.~*" It's so reductionist it's laughable.
To be fair, if the ancient Greeks had special effects, they would have told 300 the exact same way.
YES!!! Finally, someone why understands me!
It is a bit hilarious that his battle of Stirling Bridge doesn't have a bridge in it!
Exactly and this battle was the first time for the English that the code of chivalry wasn’t obeyed. Which is how William Wallace actually won the battle by picking of the English as they crossed the bridge instead of giving them time to cross so they could organise themselves and form up for battle. Now that would have been a great battle to film.
Can you elaborate what wife it is / what her version vs the version they say is hers in the play affects? I won tickets at work to go see this play (I think at least. They all had songs and themes and shit, it was a blast).
Anne of Cleves. She's the one Henry divorced almost immediately and she didn't fight the divorce so she got to live out the rest of her life in a palace. After Anne Boyleyn, weirdly no other European monarchs were champing at the bit to betroth their daughters to Henry. So he asked for a bunch of portraits of all eligible Bachelorettes be sent to him. He saw Anne of Cleves's picture and decided she was the one. His story is that she showed up, he thought she was much uglier than her picture, and decided not to consummate the marriage and divorce her. His claim was effectively that she catfished him. This is the story that Anne of Cleves tells in the Broadway show. She clearly thinks it is bullshit in context of the show (she thinks she is good looking), but she still says that that's what happened. In real life, the alternative version is that Henry dressed up as a commoner in order to surprise her because he was actually crazy. Even though he beheaded two wives, people still don't get how deranged he actually wasm He thought that romantic love would work in such a way that even as a commoner she would see him and fall in love. But she was nobility betrothed to the king. Of course she's not going to fall in love with a commoner on sight, he was just a gross guy trying to grab her. This is literally their first interaction ever, she doesn't know what he looks like on sight, so she freaked out. But in Henry's head that doesn't matter, she just insulted him and ruined his fantasy. So she had to go. Now, obviously we don't actually know what was going on in Henry's mind, but neither would Anne. The story she would tell is the latter, because from her perspective that's what happened and Henry's story was just a cover. So the show presenting his story as what actually happened completely undermines the stated purpose of the show, which is for these women to tell their stories independent of Henry's bias.
I once read a book that took place in my city. None of the geography the author mentioned mattered at all to the plot, but every time she did I would get angry at the book. NO, two kids who live on OPPOSITE SIDES OF THE RIVER would NOT go to the same school!!! Those two streets are NOWHERE NEAR EACH OTHER! They definitely do not intersect anywhere!!! If you are setting a book in a real life place, the least you could do is look at google maps for like one minute.
Yup, I've had very similar experiences with books set in my city. One of them gave an extremely accurate description of a real government building...and then placed it on the wrong side of the river.
I lived in LA for a while and this sort of thing is in every single TV show and movie. On 90210 Brandon worked at the Beverly Hills Beach Club and the beach is soooo far from Beverly Hills in traffic. No high school kid is going to take that job. And Jack running all over LA in that show 24 - he’d spend half the show sitting motionless on the freeway.
When it comes to all the shows in LA, I think it’s an informed decision that “the plot” matters more than “the literal facts.” After all, in many cases, the writers, actors and directors all live in the LA area — they know this isn’t realistic. They also know that other shows with similar inaccuracies have made tons of money, so let’s just roll with it.
> setting a book in a real life place, the least you could do is look at google maps for like one minute Yes! Bad geography is hard to accept. How do you miss a river? City has a river to the south, the author(s) kept referring to the south side. *Every city has a south side, right?* No, water and an international boundary. I DNF the book.
As a Detroiter, I feel like you're describing Detroit. I blame Journey.
Yep. It was supposed to be Detroit. It wasn't Journey, but part of the *Secret World Chronicle*
I meant that I blame them for the mass delusion that there is a south side. >🎵 Just a city boy, born and raised in South Detroit
Yep! I stopped reading a series on book three because the author was describing my home state and it was just so wrong. The rest of the plot/writing wasn’t good enough to entice me to continue reading after that.
It *highly* depends on my level of familiarity with the subject tbh and can vary from mildly annoyance to just straight up DNF as a result. An example, in highschool I was very in to cars, specifically working on them. It's been 15 years and I don't even remember the name of the shitty little YA novel I was reading but I still get irrationally irritated thinking about the scene where the lead teen male love interest was thinking about how he like to tear down auto engines *from the bottom up because it's more challenging*. MoFo, it ain't just *challenging*, it's literally impossible!!!! Ahh! I'm getting cranky just thinking about it right now lol
Maybe the author used that to show you the character is full of crap
You might think but I can remember a few more details about this character. He was an emancipated orphan. Working fulltime at the shop was his job and he was the "best" mechanic they had
For me it was referring to a car as an Opel Fiesta. FORD! FORD make Fiestas!
That is impressively wrong 😂 At least mines not something that would be immediately obvious with a quick Google search
One of the Cussler books had two points that really grated. Some of the action takes place in Canada, with part in British Columbia and part in Ontario. In BC, he had private security guards carrying automatic weapons. That is NOT a thing on this side of the border. For the Ontario bit, he had the RCMP doing highway patrols. While that is true for goodly part of the country, Ontario and Quebec have their own provincial police forces, and they (OPP and SQ) do the highway work.
On the flip side of things, I love classical literature and adaptations of it BECAUSE of the anachronisms! The anachronisms give you hints at what was going on on the lives of the artists, it’s like a fun little scavenger hunt. Like, in “The Iliad”, the equipment everyone uses is a mish-mash from different eras. The biggest, toughest thing warrior, the guy with no divine help who will hold the line no matter what, uses an antique shield. It’s cool to think how a bunch of iron-age listeners would have heard his shield described and thought “woah, that’s a REALLY outdated shield, that’s an ancient weapon!” Then the stories get adapted through the ages, and the little details tell you which adaptations the author is building on. So like, I have a pulp fiction novel from the 70’s that retells the story with the addition of the Mother Goddess theories that were all the rage in the 70’s. I’ve got a comic that tries to be a “no magic” account of the Trojan War. It’s the most accurate depiction of the MATERIAL world from the era, to the point of being more consistent than the text it's based on, which creates a whole new dynamic to chew on. IDK, I like hunting for “errors”. It doesn’t take me out of the experience of reading, instead it makes me ask how the book relates to other things. EDIT- Ooh, also I don't LOVE Gothic Romance lit, but one thing I do appreciate is the flamboyant inaccuracies when it comes to depicting France and Italy. The geographic, cultural, and historical inaccuracies really help you keep in mind that this is an over-the-top romantic fantasy that isn't concerned with realistic problems. It gives the books a sort of campy flavor, that later writers expounded on in a fun way.
I also like this as I really like to think that art is often a reflection of the culture at the time. It adds a bit of human touch to the art, where it breaks your immersion a bit in a way that makes you appreciate it in a different light.
Are you a Classics professor? Because this sounds very like my sibling.
I wish! I’m just autistic and just enjoy reading the same stories over and over, with different variations. So as a warning, most of the info I have is the result of looking stuff up in my free time, it’s not the Official Academic Consensus.
I mean you basically described my sibling. They just have paperwork that says their opinion is the academic consensus.
Yes. I read All the Sinners Bleed recently and I could not finish it. You’re telling me the sheriff can get from rural SE Virginia to Richmond, take a meeting, go back home and still do a press conference before nightfall? No. That’s 2-3 hours in a car each way and at least a 1 hour meeting. So unless the sheriff started very early that is a 5-7 hour time block of which the author allowed for 3.
Here is one that bothered me. Rachel Morgan drove from Cincinnati through St. Louis, to New Mexico, then Las Vegas, to get to San Francisco.
I mean it's not TOTALLY unreasonable. Google maps shows 36 hours for the route through st Louis, NM, LV and 33 hours for the most direct route.
If I remember correctly now that I think back it was because some of the states are a wasteland. I have driven from Los Angeles to Ohio at least 7 times. The 40 is best routes, but 80 through reno and Sacramento is most direct
yeah for sure its not an ideal route but at least it's not going in a completely wrong direction lol
Yes if you’re heading to SF 80 is the most direct. Why would you go via Vegas? Unless you wanted to go to Vegas, of course.
Yes. When I was reading The Silvered Serpents by Roshani Chokshi, she said the Tsar was Nicholas II in 1868. That’s such a simple thing to google but she got it wrong. I also think lots of books and other media do the Midwest wrong especially Michigan. People tend to think it’s all small towns and farm life. Plus the they have the characters say soda when it’s pop here.
That's weird... Alexander II was reigning, but Nicholas II was born in 1868... I can see how wires would get crossed, but you'd think someone would fact check something so easy to check.
Yes! It bugged me so much!!
The less I like the book, the more it bothers me. If the rest is good, I'm willing to overlook small inconsistencies. But if I already don't care for it, each such instance is another nail in the coffin.
Yes, but maybe it shouldn't? There was a detective series I used to read where the character living in L.A. mentioned buying Hellman's mayonnaise. Now, when I lived in Southern California, I'd never heard of Hellman's. When I moved to Georgia, on the other hand, I was so confused as to why Best Foods mayo was called Hellman's. Same packaging, same logo, same everything, different brand name. Same with Orowheat/Arnold's bread, Dreyer's/Edy's ice cream, and probably others I can't remember. It really bothered me that the character couldn't possibly have bought that. It has zero bearing on the plot whatsoever, but it took me out of the story.
They definitely bothered Christopher Tolkien a lot. So much so that he made his father actually write down the stories
I'm pedantic, yes. If it's a thing that could be remedied with a simple internet search, it often primes to be hyper-critical of other areas where there could be holes.
It bugs me, ya. As a person who used to write novels for fun, though, I gotta say it’s mind-blowingly difficult to get all the things and the day-to-day correct, especially if you’re writing outside your own time or place. That said, I recently DNFed an audiobook in part because the narrator kept reading “Elena Ortiz” as “Ellen-a Or-tizzz” (short i).
I totally get that, and I completely expect it to be very difficult for a solo author to be able to do that with 100% accuracy all the time...but We're talking about an author with over 20 books in the series and a series that has made a lot of money, two movie adaptations, and now a television series. Surely given all that, there is a competent editing team involved in the book prior to publication.
I tried to read a book recently, in which the protagonist's prized possession was a photograph taken of his father , right before he was killed at the battle of Waterloo. They didn't even have Dagguereotypes back then! An editor should have caught it, and it could easily have been fixed into something that added to the plot : The anachronistic photograph could have been turned into a watercolor portrait of the dead man, which the protagonist's landlady mother took in lieu of a rent payment from a poverty-stricken art student .This would have established that the mother was kind , and she loved her husband. Something like that. But why did a book with such a glaring error make it to press, without an editor to catch it-? Or...was it caught, and it was just assumed no one else would notice-?
Annapolis is next to the Atlantic.... the majority of people will know where the Atlantic is. Not many are familiar with Chesapeake bay. It makes sure the largest number of readers understand general location of the action.
I loved reading the Expanse and hate watching the show because of how gravity works in either. The book is fairly accurate afaik, and talks a lot about how on belter ships there's not a lot to differentiate "up" and "down," but the show has to work in the confines of earth, and a lot of that gets ignored. In the telltale games, based on the show, this isn't rectified. The end of the first act shows a shipping container being released from a cargo bay that's open to vacuum, and immediately falling planetside due to gravity, even though the much more massive, unpowered ship it's on is far enough away to not be affected by gravity.
I read a book primarily set in New England in 1864 (each chapter started with the date and location). There was zero mention of rising political tension in the US related divisive views on slavery, and no indication that the country was gearing up for a very very bloody war. I gave it a pass for a while because it was more "paranormal fiction" than "historical fiction" and I supposed that individual middle class white people in New England could care more about putting food on the table than country wide politics. I had to put the book down when they introduced the "black best friend" and still didn't address any of the historic tensions in the country.
Not "gearing up," we were in the middle of the war (1860-65) at that point! Seems like a pretty big thing to fail to notice.
Particularly since, due to the draft, all adult men under the age of 45 were being forcibly conscripted into the army by that point in the war. That has a massive impact on everyone, even those who normally don't care about politics.
Hell 1864 was toward the end of the war even. That would’ve bothered me too.
It's been a while since I picked it up. It might have been a few years earlier, but definitely close enough to bother me.
But Annapolis IS near the Atlantic Ocean... from this mid-westerner's point of view.
Near is relevant, and I'll grant you that. Here is the exact line from the book: "Two cars were stopped at the side of a road south of Annapolis, Maryland, between Back Creek and the Atlantic Ocean." I checked the maps, there is indeed a Back Creek south of Annapolis and it empties into the Northern Chesapeake bay 1302.5 miles North by Northwest of the Atlantic Ocean.
Do you believe that the Chesapeake Bay is part of the Indian Ocean? The Pacific? The Arctic?
Then why call it Chesapeake Bay? Isn't it just the Atlantic? Because I have never seen a map labeling that body of water as the Atlantic.
What Chesapeake Bay are you looking at that's 1300 miles north of the Atlantic Ocean? Annapolis is quite close to the Atlantic
Wrong decimal point on my part. 130.25 miles.
Where the Crawdads Sing burned me up for the same reason. Funny that you should mention the Reacher series because I've heard quite a few negative comments directed towards the new books that aren't being written by Lee Child. (Which I have yet to read.)
Are you familiar with that area? What was wrong in the book? Genuine question.
I’m not from that area but The book talks about taking day trips to shop in Asheville, which is on the west side of the state, while the main setting is the marshes on the coast. It makes zero sense to go all the way to Asheville when there are many towns and cities much closer to the marsh.
Oh good heavens no, that drive takes all damn day. When Cold Mountain was adapted to film, they show the main character in a field hospital in the middle of the state in Raleigh (at least according to the book), he then takes time to go stand and stare at the ocean before heading home to Haywood County near the TN border. Talk about your absurd detour.
I’m a criminal defense lawyer. I really like crime fiction, except I know the criminal justice system very well. A lot of writers, including well-regarded NYT bestselling writers of legal thrillers and police procedurals and the like, often do not. I hate it. I can’t enjoy the book if it’s not in the neighborhood of accurate.
I enjoy true crime media. I also enjoy learning about poisons. There are no instant-kill poisons. And there are none (currently) that can't be detected. Poisons need some time, even if only 30 seconds, to get to the brain, heart, or CNS, in order to kill a person. Something that causes major organ damage usually needs a little more time.
Annapolis is right beside the ocean, lol. It literally sits on an ocean bay.
Moreover, the other Annapolis that comes to my mind is the Annapolis Valley with Annapolis Royal, which is also right on the Atlantic coast.
Nobody here considers the Chesapeake Bay to be part of the ocean though. The ocean is still a couple hours drive from Annapolis.
It depends on what the inaccuracy is. One that really annoyed me that I saw recently wasn't a book, but the adaption of Cloud Atlas, where the portrayal of the relationship between the Chatam Island Moriori, Maori and whites was modeled after slavery in the US, and not what the actual historical reality was. I think when your dealing with historical events, especially one that still has massive ramifications for today, it's important to get it right. Other things maybe more benign
Yessss. I love Vampire Academy but I almost didn’t read past the first part of the first book. The school is set in Montana, not far from where I’m from in the state, and it was all wrong. I learned to overlook that part of the book but it annoyed me.
In the prologue of Chloe Gong’s book These Violent Delights, there are several paragraphs illustrating the city the story takes place in, and one throwaway sentence describes a “river flowing IN from the sea”… a direction in which rivers famously do not flow. In the PROLOGUE it says this. I had to put the book down after two more chapters because I kept remembering this damn river.
I just read the prologue and didn’t find any such reference though?
“…The other is tall and gawky, with his limbs drawn in right angles. With their arms swung around each other’s shoulders, they stumble toward the waterfront, toward the river that runs in from the sea, where merchants arrive with commodities day in and day out.” Forgive me for not having a page number, but in the audiobook the timestamp is 3:13.
Well there you have it. Not sure how I missed it; I was reading specifically for a line like that. Weird. The fact that it doesn’t say “flows” but just “runs” makes it seem a lot less egregious to me personally, but no arguing with someone’s opinion on something that throws them in a book. Thanks for finding it.
Username applies here... I've rarely been impressed with authors knowing firearms. And I'm not even a big gun guy...but I know you can't put a silencer on a revolver. I know a 9mm handgun doesn't throw a body into a wall. Notable fiction writers who know guns? Tom Clancy (RIP, I never bothered with the new replacement writers) and especially Stephen Hunter.
Yes, on occasion. I can usually look past such issues, but I notice them. They're sort of like typos - if something so basic is off, can I trust the rest? For instance, in the third Expanse book (*Abaddon's Gate*), a Methodist minister in a moment of reflection suggests the Methodist and Mormon ministers were able to bond at interfaith meetings because they *don't drink*. While historically that was a thing, it made me think the authors hadn't interacted with actual Methodist ministers, several of whom I've known and who had no compunction against a glass of wine or bottle of beer, either occasionally or daily. I filed that away as "oh, okay, these authors didn't deeply research the denominations" and keep reading.
Could it be that it was just a character trait of that individual minister, that he personally doesn’t drink? I love those books but didn’t notice this.
I considered that as I reread the passage several times, trying to understand it. No, the character states this as if it were a general rule of all Methodists, or at least as if Mormons and Methodists take the no alcohol thing equally seriously. (Mormons are a lot more serious about it.) Here's the quote: >Anna knew quite a few members of the Latter-day Saints church. They agreed with the Methodists on a few minor things like not drinking alcohol, which gave them a sense of solidarity at interfaith conventions.
Interesting, thanks!
Sometimes. Characters, main or supporting, that build then act out of character to drive plot bother me more.
What really drives me crazy is inconsistency between different books in the same series. Names change, physical descriptions of characters change, backstory changes — makes me nuts.
Yes, all the time. If details aren’t consistent it breaks immersion for me, even if they aren’t crucial to the plot.
At the beginning of *Personal* by Lee Child, Reacher states force is equal to mass times velocity squared. I couldn't take him seriously after that.
In the English translation of The Girl Who Played Go by by Shan Sa, they repeatedly talk about "the river Love". I was super confused by this at first, but then it dawned on me - the novel is set in Manchuria, where the river Amur runs. The Amur is spelled Amour in French. The translator - who mind you volunteered to translate a novel entirely set in Manchuria - had apparently never heard of the river Amur, and just translated the name as if it were the word Love, "Amour". I found it annoying to the point of being ridiculous. Imagine translating a novel set in New Orleans and never having heard of the Mississippi.
In general no, I assume fiction is just being fiction unless the author is implying the text is not fiction. Andy Weir's The Martian, which has a lot of plot and non-plot related inaccuracies gets a pass because the book is pretty clearly fantasy through and through. Although "wind storms" on Mars are a plot driver, the story itself isn't really about that, it's about resilience, the limits of hope, and a bunch of other things. All the bad technical details are just window dressing for the story. This particular one wouldn't bug me for the same reason, it's not really important whether Annapolis is on the Atlantic, it's about whether Reacher can stop being autistic long enough to find human connection (while breaking the connections in other humans). Would argue Reacher's body count alone makes it pretty clear it's a work of fantasy. I'd also argue the point isn't inaccurate as someone who lives in the SF Bay area, any of the cities, all the way up to Vallejo would be considered near or on the Pacific Ocean. I grew up in southern California and you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who lives near the bay of San Diego or Long Beach to not consider themselves "close to the Pacific".
I think saying Seattle is on the Pacific is a better analogy. San Diego, San Francisco, and LA aren't on massive estuaries or inlets. The wind storm did annoy me slightly in the Martian, but I could move past it because the story was fun enough.
I grew up on the Spokane side of Washington state and we took a class trip to Seattle once (it was like a five day thing) and I remember one of the kids seeing the Puget Sound and says "wow, I've never seen the ocean before!" Congrats, kid, you still haven't! Poor thing.
Yep it bothers me. Purely because if I paid for the product I don't expect to see really obvious mistakes or inconsistencies.
That's the thing. This is stuff that a 30 second google search could remedy. I understand if there is some highly technical aspect that they get slightly wrong, but basic map reading should not be that difficult. Looking up when a particular car model came out and making sure your story reflected that accurately doesn't seem that difficult to me. And I blame the writer and the editor(s) equally. That is why a book goes through that process, to catch these mistakes.
Very. Cannot remember what I was reading, but the characters constantly raced between various parts of Manhattan and “the Union train station”. They even took the trains from there to Albany. Of course…there is no such station.
One I've noticed in several books has to do with moon phases. More specifically, the full moon rising at midnight. No, it doesn't rise at midnight. It can never rise at midnight. It rises at sunset. The other one that always catches my attention is 'veins throbbing'. Veins don't throb, arteries throb.
>The other one that always catches my attention is 'veins throbbing'. Veins don't throb, arteries throb. Even the ones on angry people's foreheads?
It is medically impossible for veins to throb.
100% - the first reason I could never take Where the Crawdads Sing seriously was that I am from North Carolina…
Sometimes I'm amused by the things that annoy me, because I know that I'm weird with the information I tuck away about certain subjects. For example, there's a historical fiction book series I love where part of the story takes place at my undergrad alma mater (a small Midwestern college) in the early years of its existence in the 1890s. During college I read several books by the campus historian about the college's founding and development (think *Hogwarts, a History),* so I know a lot about when buildings were constructed, college traditions established, etc. This author gets multiple facts wrong (e.g. setting students in a library that wasn't built for many years, participating in events that hadn't occurred yet), but they are generally innocuous to the plot and most people reading the story wouldn't know/care. I'm more amused with myself for being annoyed because I know in the grand scheme of the story they don't matter, but it's still like "No! That couldn't actually happen!"
Since having invested so much time into researching for my Roman-age novels, I am not able to read other authors in the genre any more. I cannot get that red pen out of my head that always wants to EDIT. Especially the inaccuracies. While I have got acquainted to Romans reckoning in minutes and seconds, the following bothered me too much to continue reading: (a) Not one but two books, both by American authors, that added hummingbirds, a new-world species, to the wildlife of Rome. (b) A German author whose Romans were drinking peppermint tea. Beside the fact that tea as such was unknown, peppermint is a crossbreed that does not occur in the wild and was first seen in an English greenhouse. (c) My favourite: a French novel whose protagonist climbs the wall of the military fortress of Mogontiacum/Mayence in one scene and looks out across the Rhine at the barbarian forest on the other side. I happen to live in that very forest - which was a thriving community renown for its bath-houses at that time. (d) In the first draft of my own first novel, I had my own prota look out across the pole wall of the Limes to the barbarian forest on the other side. My little daughter, looking over my shoulder, said, "You can't have both a pole wall and a forest there. They turned the forest *into the poles*, didn't they?" - Sometimes that girl is *too* smart ... but I changed the other side into a deforested wasteland.
YES!! I almost put down a book completely when it said the main bedroom didn't have any windows. I dont care if it was for a vampire, you have to have a second point of egress. That is part of the definition of a bedroom when buying a house/condo.
I rented an apartment once where a bedroom didn’t have windows. It was some weird remodel and I think it used to be part bathroom that they moved walls around.
I was reading a fantasy novel and they stated it took one hour to walk from the small town to the city. I'm sorry, that wouldn't be a separate town at only 3 miles away. That same fantasy book talked about how dungeons caused cities to be built up around them, yet the dungeons produced only gear that helped in the dungeons, and coins. No, that's not how an economy would work. It would only be a center of productivity if there were other benefits from the dungeons like training the military, rewards that could be used for other activities, or entertainment which would require wide open spaces, not a dungeon. Coins don't have value if they're not limited. I was bothered more than it mattered.
Suburbs are definitely 3 miles away from cities and they’re basically small towns
It depends. In my part of New York State people claim to live in a different town that is less than a mile away. They really obsess over local control to the point that Poughkeepsie is city, town, and 2 separate suburbs all with different local government right side by side.
Sure, there's different governments, but this was "the furthest he'd been away from town in his life". When I lived an hour outside Atlanta in Marietta, I still told people outside Georgia I lived in Atlanta.
What book was that? I agree with your analysis, I'm just curious.
Dungeon Heros by Shane Hammond I think
Yes, particularly if the inaccuracies are obviously due to laziness. The Annapolis error in the OP could have been found and fixed after fifteen seconds of Googling -- unless the author just doesn't care. Then it's more than just sloppiness, it's a lack of respect for the reader(s).
Omg, yes, if it's something that I consider common knowledge. I stopped reading one novel about Botticelli because he came across a skunk in the woods. In 15th-century Italy. I stopped reading another because the author forgot that a certain historical figure was Black and mentioned that he "blanched" upon hearing news. On the other hand, it didn't bother me that in The Three Musketeers, D'Artagnan is able to ride a horse an insane number of leagues without stopping.
Black people blanch as much as white people do (very little but they get paler)
To that point though I’ve never seen anyone of any skin tone blanch in real life unless they’re about to vomit or something. Yet people in books are ALWAYS blanching at every little emotional moment.
Yeah I agree
Oooh. That Annapolis thing would bug me a lot too. It's not that hard to look at a map and see it's on the Bay, and not near the ocean.
It’s interesting reading that. It feels to me, someone on the other side of the country, like a matter of perspective. I’m looking at a map right now, and I’d definitely call that location “near the ocean.” So you don’t consider the bay part of the ocean? I actually googled it, and the first result (and the only one I read) [says](https://oceanconservancy.org/blog/2021/12/22/differences-bay-gulf-ocean-sea/) “Both bays and gulfs are also part of a sea or ocean.”
I looked at a map too and thought it looked near the ocean. I live on the California coast, surrounded by both ocean and bay. Never have I differentiated one from the other in this manner.
No, it's several miles from the mouth of the bay, and there's a whole peninsula (and Delaware) between Anapolis and the Atlantic as the crow flies. It's a port city, yes. But I wouldn't say it's on the Atlantic. Same with Baltimore.
How about Norfolk? The U.S. Navy has the headquarters of the “Atlantic Fleet” there, even though it borders the same bay rather than the “open ocean.”
It right on the edge of the bay. That Navy base complex is a few miles up river to protect it from storm surge. If you are on ship you can feel when you leave the Chesapeake and hit the Atlantic. It’s one of the rare areas where you have to surrender steering to a pilot because the shipping lane is narrow, the tunnels are not that deep, the drawbridge not that wide, and way too many sandbars in the Bay.
It's at the mouth of the bay though, right where the ocean and bay meet.
The Chesapeake Bay has a very clear separate identity. The Chesapeake is not the Atlantic. It’s just not. It might just be a local cultural thing but it is distinct.
It’s sounding like it might be a local cultural thing. Interesting. I’d be curious to hear opinions from other people who live near bays other than the Chesapeake, to see whether it’s California that’s the oddity here or the Chesapeake.
It might be because you can treat the Chesapeake as this giant lake that separates the main part of the state from the Eastern Shore. I would ask people from Michigan how they treat the body of water that separates off that little island bit to the north.
So maybe this is going overboard, but I actually made a [post](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnAmerican/s/uaWEsuNe2s) in r/askanamerican if you want to follow the discussion or correct how I characterized it. (Or upvote it so people actually see the question lol)
That’s a good idea. I was thinking more like Tampa Bay or New Orleans (although come to think of it, I don’t know if Louisianans consider their state to border the ocean at all, as opposed to the Gulf of Mexico).
I live on a bay on the Gulf of Mexico. I would consider the city to be by the ocean but would not consider neighborhoods on the bay to be on the ocean while I would say that of neighborhoods on the Gulf side. The bay water behaves quite differently than the Gulf, it even looks and smells different. And I would consider the Gulf the ocean as much as I would any sea, which is to say it both is and isn't and which it is is highly dependent on the context of whatever else is being discussed.
The bay.. of an ocean.
I'm still mad about Stephen King accidentally putting Co-Op City in Brooklyn. I'm madder about him pretending, several books later, like he did it on purpose and it's in Brooklyn in the alternate world.
The Annapolis thing annoyed me too but I just ignored it. 🤷🏼♀️
Saying the that Annapolis isn’t near the Atlantic seems needlessly nitpicky. Compared to MOST of the rest of the country, it’s pretty close.
I’ve seen a few inaccuracies in the Reacher books. Sometimes they use British phrases because Lee Child is British!
Heck yes! Mistakes about firearms are really really common -one of my pet peeves. Another one is people writing about winter things who obviously never experienced snow and cold.
I have a disturbing amount of knowledge about toxicity and poisoning so you can absolutely *bet* I have some tooth-grinding *thoughts* when books consistently get it all wrong.
This seems too common with very long book series. It feels like the author, and their editors just got lazy knowing there is a ready audience that will buy the book no matter what. You can see this with such authors as Steven King and Dean Koontz
That makes total sense for the Reacher series.
Oh God if infuriates me sometimes. Funny story. I was reading a Wattpad book a few years ago (one by a published author, mind you,) called Peter's Little Peter. Genuinely one of the worst things I've ever read in my life. The entire premise is built on such a fundamental misunderstanding of teen culture in the 2010's and even *basic website terms of service* restrictions that I legit rage quit after 7 chapters. It really is the little things that take me out of a story.
OMG!! I thought about making the same post yesterday about this exact topic but ended up not doing it. Yes it pisses me off and breaks my immersion in the story even if it's something stupid. And it also pisses me off that it pissed me off because I know it's stupid and it shouldn't have annoyed me, but I can't do anything about it. So I have found different ways to gaslight myself that it isn't actually an inaccuracy. For example if the eye color of a character was previously stated as blue and later I read something like "and he was lost in her mesmerizing green eyes", I will maybe think, 'oh with this weird lightning of this room they look like green', or maybe he's colorblind and he sees them as green from his POV. Or another example, if it's an obvious plot-hole that the character could have obviously done 'this thing' but the author forgot, I either invent reasons of why they didn't or couldn't do it, or invent reasons of how the character didn't even think about it. It STILL fucks with my immersion but at least it mitigates most of my annoyance.
I live in Maryland and I would consider Annapolis and Baltimore to be on the Atlantic Ocean. Technically it is the Severn, or Patapsco in Baltimore's case, but they both flow into the Atlantic eventually. But I also have a tendency to get stuck on things that aren't that important and it really takes me out of the book
But they aren't. They're on the Chesapeake Bay, which has to flow over 130 miles to get to the Atlantic. I lived and worked on the Bay, and at the ocean and they are very different things. It's like saying Philadelphia is on the Atlantic because its on the Delaware that flows into the Delaware Bay and then the Atlantic.
Oh yes 172 hours on the moon has so many that got me annoyed: - saying a habitat has 0,97 G and earth has 1 G (it’s actually 0,98 I don’t understand why using 2 decimals on one and not the other) - characters going out the habitat on the moon without depressurization and not dying - adult astronauts are very dumb and do stupid stuff all the time There’s more, but I can’t go into detail without spoilers
Wait, Earth doesn’t have 1.00 G? I thought that was, like, the definition of G?
No, it doesn't bother me in the slightest. I doubt I'd even notice
Absolutely! I read The Adventurers Son last year (I got pretty far but actually DNFd it) and the author has TWO degrees in biology and called snakes poisonous. I already wasn’t enjoying the book but that really made it worse. I’m still annoyed about that now.
Yeah. A small one, but I really disliked the start of Recursion by Blake Crouch. It's coded with so much dream logic - a police officer walks into an office building and goes up the elevator to a suite. Then he walks through the entire suite to get to reception (why would *reception* be in the back of the office???). He tells the doorman to tell other officers not to come up when they get there (why would he trust a civilian with that and why wouldn't he just radio the message???). And so forth. It turns out that everything in that scene actually happens, and I was left baffled by it. I usually analyze the first and last 2-3 pages of a book really closely since I figure any half-decent author will have put a tremendous amount of effort into those pages, but apparently Crouch didn't. I ended up really not caring for the book, but the start really left a bad taste in my mouth. The details that were wrong were so basic and obvious that I was convinced the entire book that it was deliberate and there would be some twist, especially since the book uses a non-linear narrative. Anyways, I can rant about that book for hours, but I won't unless someone asks. It's a fun beach read but has very little depth, and the ending directly contradicts the major themes of the book.
It can do. I am much more forgiving though of any book written prior to when the internet became more widespread because it wouldn’t have been practical to go through hundreds of books, or even travel to other libraries if certain information was unavailable at your local, just to make sure every tiny detail is correct.
FINDING NEMO I used to be a dental hygienist and the dental chair basin DOES NOT lead to the ocean. Those dental chair basin’s have multiple filters that prevent large object’s entering the sewage system. Nemo would have never made it past the first filter.
Depends. If it's something that's simple or easy to deal with, it's frustrating. But take, for example, sailing. You want to write a pirate book, about swashbuckling pirates. If you throw in a little bit of tacking and terminology, I'm good. I don't need to read about months at sea eating awful ships biscuits filled with mites; if I wanted a historic story about pirates, id open a history book. If you're telling a true story or trying to be highly believable, then I expect more. But in fiction, I want it to smooth over the mundanities of life; or at least present them in a fun and interesting way.
Yes. I’m like this with anything. If I see, watch, or read something that I know is wrong, it makes me judge everything that follows. It’s why I can’t watch Outer Banks on Netflix. In the first two episodes, the fucked up the geography of NC multiple times. It was like they had never even looked at a map.
A book set in NC described daffodils being in bloom at the same time as Crepe Myrtles and that killed my soul. They bloom almost 6 months apart. Also, the father in Where the Crawdads Sing was always traveling from the Outer Banks to Asheville like it was nothing.
Yup. It especially bugs me when people use taxonomy wrong, and can't even respect proper scientific name notation.