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?

In my case it would be because I sat down to drink my soda, saw the coffee and thought 'rats, better drink that first'...

To be fair I'd probably make coffee, reach in the fridge for the milk, forgot why I'd opened it, grab a 'can of pop' (because I grew up in the Midlands not the USA) open that , put it down next to the coffee, reach for my drink, pick up the coffee think 'oh I haven't put milk in this' go back to the fridge get the milk and drink my coffee. But that is because I'm a knackered middle aged woman.

Antonia Forest had to put in a note about Peter's anachronistic presence at Dartmouth naval college. She set most of her Marlow books when they were written, but her characters didn't age to match - so Peter continued as a naval cadet long after the college had stopped admitting school-aged boys.

I live up north where there aren't many Waitroses and once got excited when Google maps suggested one had opened a short drive away.

It turned out to be one at a service station on the M62 🙁

Antonia Forest had to put in a note about Peter's anachronistic presence at Dartmouth naval college. She set most of her Marlow books when they were written, but her characters didn't age to match

It's a hazard for any author who writes about the same characters over a long period of time. Dame Agatha acknowledged that Poirot and Miss Marple would both have been well over a hundred if they'd aged as they should have done.

And the Chalet school, mentioned above, were published between 1925 and 1970, but the characters only aged about 25 years. The timeline is further complicated by having the fixed point of the Anschluss part way through, so you can't just say it all happened at some vague time in the 20th century.

I tend to group the eras in my head by where the school was based at the time. EBD is sometimes criticised for continuity but actually I think there are remarkably few errors bearing in mind the number of books, the time over which they were were written and the vast cast of characters

It’s been going on for a while - this is the cover (the cover!!) of a book published about 20 years ago

I've just finished reading a book where the author goes to great lengths to describe the character getting a cold can of soda out of the fridge, and on the next page, sipping at her rapidly cooling coffee

I noticed that, it really annoyed me. Can’t remember the book though :-(

Yes!! I came on here to say this. How can no-one have noticed? 🙄

Recently read The Best Things by Mel Giedroyc, which is set in Leatherhead, Surrey. At one point she refers to a character wearing a ‘fanny pack’, which I was surprised at, being an American term, instead of ‘bum bag’ which it would have been referred to in this country. Also one of the schoolgirl characters was called Joan, which didn’t fit in with the era the book was written in - in my opinion anyway!

Nice one! It took me a good minute to spot that error. And I get paid to spot stuff like that 😄

He’s talked a lot about how he feels that using specific brands and shop names adds to a character and the specificity of the writing. That the specific bars Chris eats before he meets Patrice tells us more about him than if we’re told he ‘bit into another bar of chocolate’. Or that the outings from Cooper’s Chase meeting for the return bus outside Ryman’s, rather than ‘the stationery shop’.

Pain for translators, though.

I don't mind one character with an 'out of era' name people do have them. But it's frustrating when a whole cast of characters who were supposedly born in Manchester in the 1980s are called Doris, Ivy, Elsie and Mavis or Mia, Eva, Lottie and Olivia. It's practically the law that if more than three women born in the 80s get together at least one will be called either Sarah or Claire.

Though there are far more mind-bending things in them that child me certainly found discombobulating, like how the twins are buying obviously late 60s/70s trendy secondhand clothes and there’s a linked plot line about dealing pot, and Lawrie dresses up as a punk, but their only slightly older mid-teens sister is terribly claustrophobic because she got trapped in their cellar in the Blitz.

Absolutely, it does seem more real when a writer uses real brands, places and things. They just need to check that a stereotypically middle class town does actually have a stereotypically middle class supermarket before they locate one there.

See, I don’t think it matters at all. It’s the location for a quick meeting between the baddie and a goodie. It could have easily have happened in a Costa or a car park or a deserted warehouse, apart from the fact that making it a Waitrose allows Ventham to be snide about the lack of availability of non-fair trade coffee and to be clocking all the prosperous over 60s who can afford Waitrose prices as potential customers at Cooper’s Chase.

But it’s not as though it’s Kevin Costner riding from Dover to Sherwood Forest via Hadrian’s Wall, or a major plotline involving someone running a successful mole catching business in Ireland

I haven't actually read Thursday Murder Club so I have no idea what role (the nonexistent) Waitrose plays. I've just seen how much it has divided opinion on this thread and heard RO talking about it.

It took me years to amass the whole series (long before buying online was possible) so I read them as I could find them - Autumn Term first and then The Cricket Term. Discombobulated is spot on! To add to the sudden appearance of Top of The Pops, etc. when in the last book I read WW2 was a recent thing, Karen having acquired three children, after having been on her way to Oxford in AT was equally disconcerting.

Absolutely! I was the same, and read them piecemeal from the library. Marie Dobson dying while getting up to turn on Top of the Pops while at the same time being a classmate of Miranda, who started at Kingscote when she was evacuated to the area during WW2 was another mind-boggler.

To be fair the better small publishers do too (although the proofreader will often be freelance). Small publishers publish fewer books, so it’s more noticeable if one of their books has errors, and their reputation suffers.

I've definitely been seeing more typos and errors in books lately, though not too many in a single book so I don't mind so much but a much worse error in a recent book I read was that a major part of the plot was that the police didn't know if the killer was male or female, yet they had the killer's DNA the whole time.

Can you put me out of my misery? I'm not seeing the error here.

(EDITED TO ADD: ... apart from the shockingly bad taste!)

STARTLINGY in the puff quote - missing an L

Ah-ha! Thank you @clary. I can relax now. I wonder if the correct presence of the earlier L in the same word tricked my brain (and the cover team's) into hallucinating it at the later location.

It’s not just in fiction for the general public, it’s also happening in academic books. The proofreaders is that they (the publishing houses) are employing are either overseas, or AI. And they are terrible.

The last two text my husband has sent for publication, the editors have changed things in ways that are frankly nonsensical, and my husband has had to tell them to revert completely back to the original text.

No one wants to do things properly anymore. They just cut corners everywhere.