• Welcome to BookAndReader!

    We LOVE books and hope you'll join us in sharing your favorites and experiences along with your love of reading with our community. Registering for our site is free and easy, just CLICK HERE!

    Already a member and forgot your password? Click here.

Mistakes in Books

L

lies

New Member
Does anybody else really enjoy finding mistakes in books?

I've forgotten almost every single one I ever found, but reading the BotM-thread made me think of this one: somewhere in Wizard and Glass Eldred Jonas is thinking about Roland as Roland, and not as Will Dearborn, when in fact he's still in the dark as far as Roland's identity is concerned.

There are so many of these "errors" in novels (I'm not talking spelling mistakes here, cause there are also plenty of them), but most of the time I don't even notice them. So whenever I do find one of them, I'm really happy about it. Makes you realize how much work it takes to write and publish a book... And that nobody's perfect, not even the people we look up to ;)
 
Hi Lies,

I do spot mistakes now and then, I hate obvious typos more. What I really enjoy, along the same idea is continuity errors in movies. I find TONS of them. It's amazing no one catches them...
~Witch
 
Yay! I'm so glad someone shares my passion. I'm not all that great at spotting them, but I try.

Another "error" I came across:

I found book A in the library. Its title was B, its writer C, its cover text D and its content E. A while later, I found another book, book Z. Its title was Y, its writer X, its cover text (though very similar to D) W and its content... E. To the letter.

That worried me. Does anyone know how this could've happened?
 
I do find errors in books, although right at the moment I can't quote one. I tend to read it, then reread it. Then think it's intentional. Then second guess myself. I mean, if it's in a book, it's meant to be there....right? (HA!)
 
Plot holes, right Witchchild? More irritating that potholes and just as rough on the mental ride. I tend to be more forgiving about plot holes in movies--afterall its only Hollywood, right?--than in books. Seems to me they ought to be better able to get the kinks out of a book where no concessions have to be made to making a film.

lies, sounds like a binding error. If you looked them up the book, the author and the text probably came from the same printing house. Probably a cat in the binding machine or something. (Meeeyow!) What's worse is that there are at least six other books besides the two you found that are messed up--probably more if the cat had anything to do with it.

I remember diligently reading my way through a disturbing and convoluted Heinlein novel once only to find that the last 37 pages had been replaced by the first 37. It was as close as I have ever come to chucking a book in the fireplace.
 
Originally posted by Prolixic
lies, sounds like a binding error. If you looked them up the book, the author and the text probably came from the same printing house. Probably a cat in the binding machine or something. (Meeeyow!) What's worse is that there are at least six other books besides the two you found that are messed up--probably more if the cat had anything to do with it.
Click to expand...
That could well be it. But why did the cover have similar summaries on them then?

Originally posted by Prolixic
I remember diligently reading my way through a disturbing and convoluted Heinlein novel once only to find that the last 37 pages had been replaced by the first 37. It was as close as I have ever come to chucking a book in the fireplace.
Click to expand...
I can see how that would upset someone. ;)
 
I find tons of mistakes in books I read, and isnt someone supposed to proof read the book millions of times before it gets published? I always feel like re-writing the line over again so I understand it or whatever it needs done, but I stop myself... :)
 
Once and a while I'll come across a spelling mistake, but I usually second-guess myself because the editor is probably smarter than I am. That and the fact that we like to think that books are written perfectly.

If it's an older novel, mistakes are usually corrected in the newly released editions, but I'm sure you guys know that.

Has anyone caught a mistake in translations? For example, the writer used a certain French word to translate, but it was not the right one. I'm curious.
 
Steph said:
Has anyone caught a mistake in translations? For example, the writer used a certain French word to translate, but it was not the right one. I'm curious.
Click to expand...

That would be hard to catch unless you were fluent in the original language and either had an intimate knowledge of the story beforehand or were doing a side by side comparison.
 
Steph said:
Has anyone caught a mistake in translations? For example, the writer used a certain French word to translate, but it was not the right one. I'm curious.
Click to expand...

Frequently; I'd say it's probably one of the most common mistakes. Though it's less common in books than in DVD subtitles and the like, translators occasionally seem to suffer acute brainfreezes and translate a completely different word - often one that's spelled or sounds similar or one that has more than one meaning - or fail to spot something that's supposed to be a play on words or a specific idiom and translate it verbatim.
 
Oh, I love finding grammatical mistakes in books. I have an annotated copy of Pride and Prejudice and there are a ridiculous amount of errors in the annotations. They call characters by the wrong names, there are spelling and grammatical errors, etc. It really is pathetic and kept me from actually finishing the book because I was getting so aggrevated that the annotations were crap, haha.
 
After finding a few typos in a book I always start thinking about highlighting them and sending them to the publisher with a letter telling them that people notice and we expect much more of them than they demonstrated. I found a really weird series of sentences in an Arthur C. Clark book recently (Richter 10) where he referred to something that hadn't happened yet. I read the sentences over and over not making sense of it til later in the story and remember thinking, "Even exceptional writers like Arthur C. Clarke can make significant mistakes... interesting" I would imagine his books are as well proofread as most... Would the proofreader hesitate to mention something of that nature to a writer of a particular standing? Hmmmmm :confused:
 
I found a lot of typographical errors in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. They were mostly very silly--a lot of times just a letter left out of a word. I found it irritating after awhile.
 
This is why I can never read my own books once they have been published... a book is never finished being edited and all I ever do is find more sentences that I would change the wording in and once in a while grammatical errors or typos. It doesn't matter how many times your book is edited, it will never be done.
 
gonewiththewind said:
After finding a few typos in a book I always start thinking about highlighting them and sending them to the publisher with a letter telling them that people notice and we expect much more of them than they demonstrated.
Click to expand...


I've always wondered how many people do this.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top