Does it spoil a book for you if

flower tattoo

the author has written about things in the wrong year?

for example, i'm reading the new Catherine Alliott and she has the start of it based around the Balkan war in 1995 yet prior to this the main character was based in an office e-mailing away and answering calls on her mobile!!

i find it really distracting and am constantly working backwards in my head thinking when i first used emails and texted regularly.

Tina Reilly also based her last book in 1995 and the whole book hinged on a text message . It bugged me throughout the book that the time was wrong but at the end she added a note to say that although she knew texts weren't used then, the story would appear more relevant to readers who weren't aware of that.

drives me crazy

Apolloyon

I had my first email account in 1995 and I had my first mobile phone in 1996.* Having said that I agree that there is a tendency for some writers to conflate time periods and what occurred in them. Generally this is down to poor research and unfortunately it can as you said be very distracting and ruin your suspension of disbelief. It's actually not very difficult to check facts especially as let's face it, it's just a matter of breaking it down into two parts. Firstly, check it online and then secondly go your local library or bookshop and confirm your initial finding with source material. It's just lazy to do otherwise in my opinion.

*Yes, I am old!

Kinski

Anachronisms are really annoying! In Cormac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men, which was set in 1980, one character had a mobile phone, which afaik weren't yet commercially available in the US. Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was also set in the 1980s and featured email-type stuff, but it is a kind of a magic realist novel so I guess that's permissible - never my favourite Murakami book though, so I might just be looking for things to complain about!

IvyTheTerrible

Poor research drives me nuts and can spoil the impression of an otherwise good book. It just starts me wondering if I spotted THAT mistake, what else was wrong with it.

Two instances that particularly bothered me:

• in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society: There is a scene where a nurse gives the weight of a patient as 100 pounds. Now this nurse was either French or English. So she would have given it as kilograms or stones and pounds but not just pounds. Too Americanised.
• The Secret Scripture is set in my home town. In the story there is a fair bit about the main character being a able to see the cairn on Knocknarea mountain from the beach. But from where the author describes it, you can't see the cairn from that place. It bothered me, because Barry had obviously done a lot of research about what Strandhill was like in the 1920s but that sort of little detail would be easy to verify if you actually went there.

Mellor

IvyTheTerrible wrote: »

• in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society: There is a scene where a nurse gives the weight of a patient as 100 pounds. Now this nurse was either French or English. So she would have given it as kilograms or stones and pounds but not just pounds. Too Americanised.

While the kilo was the offical unit pounds were commonly imperial units were used informally. I don't know exactly when the kilo became the main unit informally but around WW2 the pound was commonly used. Much like the tradition of using stone/pounds/feet/inches in ireland

mrsdewinter

OP... That's incredibly lax of the authors mentioned. You can't even blame research - what research do you need to just scroll back thru your own memories of what life was like in the mid-90s? Thought novelists were able to step into other people's shoes... If they can't even summon up their own direct experiences of life 15 years ago...

IvyTheTerrible

Mellor wrote: »

While the kilo was the offical unit pounds were commonly imperial units were used informally. I don't know exactly when the kilo became the main unit informally but around WW2 the pound was commonly used. Much like the tradition of using stone/pounds/feet/inches in ireland

Yes I realise that, but my understanding is that weight would have been referred to in stones and pounds, not as a pound total?

lordgoat

Things like this piss me off so much. I'd also lay some blame at the editor/fact checkers alot of pub houses are meant to have.

iguana

I also hate it when the author hasn't even bothered working out the basic maths. Like if a character is 32 and then they refer to something that happened 5 years ago when the character was 25. It just throws me right out of the story.

Though the one you refer to where the author chose to stick a text message in a story based in 1995 would make me really angry. Especially as it was justified by saying contemporary readers needed it to feel relevant. Why not just set the book in say, 1999, when text messaging was relatively common? Was there a reason she chose 1995?

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[

Though the one you refer to where the author chose to stick a text message in a story based in 1995 would make me really angry. Especially as it was justified by saying contemporary readers needed it to feel relevant. Why not just set the book in say, 1999, when text messaging was relatively common? Was there a reason she chose 1995?[/QUOTE]


not as far as i recall and the really annoying thing was the disclaimer was at the end so i'd spent the whole book thinking 'i'm sure i didn't use text till 1997 ish'

Rabble Rabble

Mobile phones emails were available in 1995. I think the mobiles were mostly analog. Emails were available in 1980.

The internet/arpanet is two generations old. The setting of the mobile phones and text in 1995 seems to have been a mistake, but maybe not ( She did say so though). I know that I was using text in 1998, maybe 1997. I am an early adopter, so I was texting a few other early adopters. Certainly not my family. A few years later I couldnt stop them texting. However I am not that early an adopter. I doubt I got text in the first year it was released, and I didnt look for it. It was there when I got my first mobile. ( I was still in college and they were becoming more common. Prior to the 90's they were analogue mobile phones - big bricks - for about a decade).

From Wiki:

The first commercial deployment of a short message service center (SMSC) was by Aldiscon (now Acision) with Telia (now TeliaSonera) in Sweden in 1993[21], followed by Fleet Call (now Nextel)[citation needed] in the US, Telenor in Norway[citation needed] and BT Cellnet (now O2 UK)[citation needed] later in 1993. All first installations of SMS gateways were for network notifications sent to mobile phones, usually to inform of voice mail messages. The first commercially sold SMS service was offered to consumers, as a person-to-person text messaging service by Radiolinja (now part of Elisa) in Finland in 1993. Most early GSM mobile phone handsets did not support the ability to send SMS text messages, and Nokia was the only handset manufacturer whose total GSM phone line in 1993 supported user-sending of SMS text messages.

I actually get annoyed by the opposite. The Rules of Attraction, which didnt seem to be a period piece when released in 2002, depended on some of it's misunderstandings on people missing calls in the hallways of student dorms.

Mellor

Rabble Rabble wrote: »

I actually get annoyed by the opposite. The Rules of Attraction, which didnt seem to be a period piece when released in 2002, depended on some of it's misunderstandings on people missing calls in the hallways of student dorms.

Em, The Rules of Attraction was published in the 1987 and is set in the 80s
The film adaption was 2002 and isn't given a defined period afaik