Mistakes in recently published fiction books

[Danascully2]

Has anyone else noticed poor proofreading in published books recently? I'm not talking about the finer details of colon vs semi colon etc but words in the wrong order, or in one case the same sentence twice in a paragraph (I'm confident it was an error rather than some sort of artistic choice). My 8 year old could have spotted them. I understand it's tricky to proofread a whole book but I presume it is somebody's job to do just that (editor?).
Or have mistakes always slipped through occasionally and it's just chance that I've had quite a few recently?

Yes, I read a lot and would say it's the exception to read a book which doesn't have errors. I abandon about 30-40% of the books I start reading. If the publisher and/or the author doesn't care enough to ensure it's up to an acceptable standard, then why should I care enough to read it? In my experience it's UK authors in particular. It predates AI so it's either that publishers have very low standards, or don't even bother. Newspapers and magazines are the same. It's sad.

Richard Osman has said he just assumed that TW did have a Waitrose and was shocked to discover it it didn't. Re the Lidl vans I believe they are just referred to as Lidl vans and he intended them as store delivery vans not as home delivery vans but people assumed he meant home delivery. They are on the main road not at the old folks home.

I think that was half the the problem. They assumed that TW did have a Waitrose, so didn’t bother to check it!

One of the later Harry Potter novels contains the sentence "A silence fell downstairs." I hope it didn't bump its head.
Not strictly an error, but a daft enough misfire to make you think that someone would have picked it up before publishing such a high-profile and lucrative book.

Personally, I think that Richard Osman is allowed to pretend there is a Waitrose in Tunbridge Wells. After all, the murder club is probably pretend too.

Was it in the context of 'downstairs a silence fell' and it was just slightly amusingly worded or was it 'in the room a silence fell' with a totally unconnected downstairs?

Our oak tree currently has almost most of its leaves and they are still all green! Fall much than other trees.

I was amazed at the glaring continuity error in the Strike novels. I would have assumed that if anyone would have the financial/publishing clout to have everything triple checked it would be JKR.

Ha! In the first one (which is the only one I've read) she didn't even bother to look up the route from St John's Wood to wherever he was going sarf of the river that I've forgotten (due south across Battersea or Lambeth Bridge). She sent him via the Blackwall Tunnel!

She was trying to convey that it had become silent downstairs, but she missed the fact that the figurative use of 'fell' took on an unintentionally comic literal meaning in her phrase. (Well, either unintentional or she was taking the piss, but I don't think that a professional writer would deliberately chuck in a private joke like this.)

This doesn’t feel like a mistake to me. It’s not like it’s a non fiction book. There are lots of things in it that aren’t true. The nursing home it’s set in isn’t there either.

DH has just read a 90s sci-fi book and the name of the main character changed halfway through the book.

In one chapter another character was given dialogue despite not being in the room or scene.

Btw, why doesn’t Tunbridge Wells have a Waitrose when it’s so perfect for their market?

I recently read a novel where a character was a girl with a pet dog. On one paragraph, they swapped names and so the dog was hiding behind a sofa, clutching her dolly, whilst the girl was throwing herself at the door, snarling and growling. The next paragraph, back to normal human/canine behaviour/names. The same author/proofreader also didn't know the difference between accept and except, or discreet and discrete .... I haven't bought anything else of theirs, even though the actual story was pretty good.

I work in on of the biggest publishers and our books are still very much edited and proofread! There is however a lot more time pressure than there used to be, we’re publishing more books to tight deadlines, often to meet the demands of the US market where we sell a lot of books. They need finished copies earlier than we do because their distribution chain is a lot more complicated, so our books are being squeezed to meet their needs rather than our own. I’d love to spend more time working on them, but often it’s not possible.

The Guest List by Lucy Foley I think her name is. It was awful. It made no sense. A character drives in the sea to rescue someone, then goes back to the wedding in a wet suit but never gets changed and just carries on the party, no one ever mentions it again. A different character starts getting full named half way through for no reason, as if he should have been a smaller character but she went back and added him in earlier, then disappears off the face of the earth towards the end of the book completely anyway. Whole paragraphs in the book don't seem to fit. It was awful, I won't be reading anything of hers again.

Uck, no. I've just bought that.

Although it was 50p in a charity shop so I'm not massively out of pocket.

Honestly, donate it back. By the end, you'll have about 7 plotholes left unanswered and be as annoyed as me. Goodreads Q&A is just a list of confused people 😭

😂 Oh dear. I think I'm more excited to read the Goodreads Q&A than the book now.

The one the I noticed was much bigger and more glaring than that. One could choose to use the Blackwall Tunnel whenever going sarf of the river but you can't choose to have not done something you did as a fairly major plot point in an earlier book.

Was that the one about the number of funerals Robin had attended? Completely missing out her future mother-in-law's?

Yep.

I recently read Way Back by Sara Cox and was v surprised at how many spelling errors there were. Library copy so not some random pre-release thing. There was also a weird wrong name being used at one point - can't remember the details but it was very jarring. Despite all of the above, I really enjoyed the story but, honestly, it made me cross to find so many mistakes!

I'm glad I'm not the only one annoyed by it! 😂

John Grisham, Boys from Biloxi

There is a significant continuity error in the book regarding the fate of the character Sheriff "Fats" Bowman, suggesting a lack of thorough editing.
On page 412 of the print edition, the book states that Sheriff Fats Bowman "pulled out a .357 Magnum, and blew his brains out".
Immediately following this, on the next page (page 413, Chapter 53), the text refers to "Fats Bowman freezing in Maine".
Further, on page 414, it is mentioned that "Fats now being in bars" (presumably behind bars in prison).

I gave up on the book set in the Wars of the Roses that had someone using a porcelain chamber pot.

I persevered with Pillars of the Earth despite Ken Follet's tenancy to have his protagonist stand with his hand in his pocket.

I tutted at Diana Gabeldon for have absolutely no sign of the on going war (everyone demobbed and home, a lack of rationing etc) in the summer of 1945 just because it was post VE day.

They are all things that anyone with a bit of historical knowledge should have queried before the books were published and they are the type of errors that make me wonder what else will be plan wrong.

Robin forgetting she'd been to Matthew's Mum's funeral actually made me laugh.

Equally bad, a book I read referred to "leafs" falling.