Bookworm by Lucy Mangan

Ummm.... you seem to care because you are posting, and people are therefore replying.

@ImaginedCorners , what @Pemba posted.

It's a pretty big plot point though. Nothing like the colour of a dress as a pp mentioned. Lucy in the book doesn't meet Aslan until much later on. It is of course Mr Tumnus she meets on her first visit and promises to help.

I would think that many readers remember that. The book is so iconic and also there have been film and TV adaptations etc. Lucy Mangan may have read TLTW&TW, but you do question how much of a devoted reader she really was. And then that leads you to question everything else in her book, what a shame.

But so are virtually all the novels she talks about. They’re almost all much-loved children’s books. I’ve not read Bookworm, but I’ve picked it up in bookshops and dipped into it more than once, and I think I’d read pretty much everything she namechecked. (Same age, same obsessive childhood reading). There’s nothing that makes a plot error in TLTWATW any more inexcusable than one in Little House on the Prairie or Little Women.

Who cares. I'm not going to read it.

As are - presumably - many if not all of the books she references.

@SheilaFentiman , because it is a much-loved children's book that the readers of Lucy Mangan's book will have read.

Do you? LM clearly read voraciously and she's, what, 50 now?

I used to read a book a day as a teen (I kept a record for a project) and I would not be able to tell you much about the plot or characters of many of them now. Doesn't mean I didn't read them.

Honestly, why is it one that shouldn't have happened? Lucy did meet Aslan, just not on her first visit. It's not an invention that she met him. It seems a fairly minor error.

It doesn't take that long to check something.
Sure, but if she mentioned a couple of plot points from each of 50-100 books or whatever, I guess it adds up.

It would be interesting to know if this was ever corrected - if not, that suggests the vast majority of readers haven’t spotted this error either. I must say, I’ve read TLTWATW many times as a child and I didn’t spot that error. In the grander scheme of what she was saying, it’s was irrelevant.

The poster who first raised it took the view that she didn't believe LM had actually read the book, given the mistake, and that seemed an overstatement, on grounds that e all forget things (and honestly, if she was making up books she had read, she probably would only put in plot points verified by google!)

Overstatement? Bit much. I struggle to believe that someone like Lucy would misremember about something in a book so apparently beloved to her.

How? The editor would have to read every single book Lucy Mangan writes about to be able to guarantee her recall is accurate. While fact checkers do exist, they are generally deployed only when the book being strictly factually accurate is key (no one is going to find a history of WW2 credible where the author repeatedly gets dates wrong) or where there’s a strong possibility of legal action for libel about inaccuracies, for instance. And obviously a fact checker for what you’re talking about would have to read all the novels discussed, not just one. In a memoir about obsessive childhood reading viewed through a veil of adult nostalgia, does it matter enormously whether the author remembers Lucy as meeting Aslan on her first visit to Narnia rather than her third or the colour of the puff/sleeved dress Mrs Rachel Lynde makes for Anne Shirley?

@Ddakji , mistakes do happen, but that one is one that shouldn't have happened.

Mistakes happen, and they particularly can happen in books on short schedules where corners have to be cut. Shouldn’t happen, of course, but it does!

@SheilaFentiman , it's called doing a job. It doesn't take that long to check something.

LM probably misremembered, but that is no excuse.

Also an editor, and I have had to argue with an author that the image he was describing was a cheetah, not a leopard.

I didn't win. He had apparently described it as a leopard in several previous works already and didn't want to be inconsistent.

Glad someone else remembered poor overlooked non-twinny Cecil.

A quick google hasn't told me how many books she referenced, but did say that the list at the back of the book of all those she mentions comes to 12 pages. Given the economics of publishing, would you have time to check all of those? Impressive if so!

Look, I don't think it's brilliant that the mistake made it to the final version, but I presume that does happen from time to time. The poster who first raised it took the view that she didn't believe LM had actually read the book, given the mistake, and that seemed an overstatement, on grounds that e all forget things (and honestly, if she was making up books she had read, she probably would only put in plot points verified by google!)

@SheilaFentiman , Yes. It's part of the job.

I wouldn't have needed to check that one because I have read the book a few times, but any error like that will be spotted by many readers, and it diminishes the credibility of the author and the publisher.

Would you do it for every single mention of every single aspect of every single book?

Genuinely interested - how much time do you have per book for this sort of editing (as opposed to sentence structure etc)?

You’ve forgotten Cecily the only singleton girl after Felix and Felicity!

@SheilaFentiman , @mylovedoesitgood , in your browser, type 'Who does Lucy meet when she first goes to Narnia?'.

I'm an editor, and this would be the very least I would do.

How can an editor, or several, check everything in a book? They don't have the time.

How can the editor check without reading the books in question? (Whilst this error is earlyish in the book, I'm assuming that the author alludes to several events in lots of manuscripts that may be early or late in the narrative)

@SheilaFentiman , I didn't say the editor should have read them. I said the editor should have checked.

I am not sure how many books feature in Bookworm, but I assume more than 10. Is it the job of an editor to read all of them?