The subject of the book is not what disgusts me. There are many misplaced modifiers, stilted and potboiler dialogue, a medical examiner who tells a coworker to "describe that disease more clearly. I am not good with acronyms" (the well-known name of the disease is an acronym), and generally poorly-written sentences.

I called my home library. A reference librarian gave me permission to stop reading and return the book only two days into its checkout period of two weeks. "You will make at least five patrons happy by keeping it moving."

Have you ever started a book that you just couldn't finish?

Last Edited on 25-Aug-2007 1:20 PM

Back in my less assured days, I forced myself to forge on to at least the midpoint of any book that came well recommended. That included some highly regarded classics such as The Sun Also Rises. For whatever reason, I just couldn't get through it at the time, and of course I blamed myself because, after all, it was a classic. But halfway--I'd give it that before letting myself off the hook. And so I persevered, sometimes only through grim resolve.

After I'd been a professional editor for some years, I finally said to myself, "You know what? I'm a pretty competent reader. And if I just can't get through something or can't even get into it, I don't have to justify my decision to drop it. After all, what's the reason I'm reading this? There's a world of books out there. Move on."

This was in my mind when I advised Rachel to let go of Anna Karenina for now. And again, of course, this principle does not apply to assigned reading for a class.

Since then, I go no further than I want to. If something doesn't engage me, I do stay with it for a while longer before giving up, and sometimes it picks up. But an irritating style or habit (for example, chronic comma splices, overuse of Capitalization for Effect, unconscious repetition of words) doesn't get better. I ditched one book on page two because the author couldn't handle restrictive and nonrestrictive relative pronouns. I tried to read Cold Mountain for a book discussion group, and I found the style annoying and nothing to care about in the main characters, so I skimmed everything from about page 60 in an hour, read one scene about 3/4 of the way through, and let it go at that. I went to the discussion anyway and felt I hadn't missed much. I tossed another recent novel halfway through the first chapter because I didn't like the main character's name.

I finish by far the majority of books I start, and I even persist in some bad ones because there is something I want to gain or learn from reading them. But if the author doesn't deliver on his promises or simply didn't get the job done, I don't owe him anything.

I'm referring not to simple misprints, which are forgivable if not too numerous, but to contradictions, impossibilities, and factual errors. For example, the protagonist, forty-two years old and of at least normal intelligence, is thinking back to an event which occurred thirty years ago, when he was in the fourth grade. A guy is packing a revolver at the beginning of a chapter, and by the end of that chapter, the weapon has magically metamorphosed into a semi-automatic pistol. A car explodes because it has been sabotaged by someone who poured jet fuel into the gas tank. Actually, that car probably would have been even safer than before. With enough jet fuel diluting the gasoline, the car wouldn't even start, let alone explode! (Similar to kerosene, jet fuel is much less volatile than gasoline.)

Sure, copy editors of fiction should know the English teacher stuff, but their knowledge should extend beyond the liberal artsy.

Last Edited on 1-Sep-2007 2:43 PM

My favorite character was the hospital doorman. He didn't do anything to annoy me.

Last Edited on 1-Sep-2007 5:19 PM

I am currently forcing my way through a legitimately published novel by one of the stars of my local writers' club, whose book not only is highly touted by the publisher but was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. I had high expectations for this book. In the first paragraph I encountered a startling grammatical error that caused my doubts to rear up. By now, midway through, I have long since passed "appalled" and no longer shriek aloud when I find "peaked" for "peeked," "vile" for "vial" (twice), and verb constructions such as "should not have wrote." I would stake my reputation on a bet that this book was not edited by a competent copyeditor and was not proofread by any kind of real proofreader, even an incompetent one, who could not have failed to see big spaces before closing quotes and other gross errors of form and convention. I doubt that it was read all the way through, word for word, by anyone on the path to publication. The number of errors of sheer ignorance on the author's part is nothing short of astonishing. I am persisting now out of a sort of fascinated horror, wondering if there is at least a compelling enough story here to justify all the attention (so far not), and coming to a sort of jaded view that perhaps its chief selling point is its cross-culturalism.

And the author had a career as an editor before publishing this novel. The very thought makes me shudder.

When my book is finally ready for prime time, I know that I will be remembering this emperor dressed in new clothes. Are my chances better or worse because this is out there?

If SM's author can do it, certainly CeeBee can. Heck, if Robin Cook can do it with the awful novel I have been complaining about in this thread, CeeBee may have a chance.

Last Edited on 2-Sep-2007 8:14 PM

As for my novel, I just had a wonderful plot-and-character breakthrough over this weekend and am looking forward to seeing how that plays out. I am now finally convinced it's doable.

At least the Bulletin has not utterly forgotten its service-to-members role. But don't get me started, at least not here.

I'm not sure line editors get much attention either; several times I have noticed a paragraph late in the book that exactly repeats a paragraph earlier in the book. I'm sure the author thought that the first place he put the paragraph wasn't the best place, so he moved it -- but he copied and did not delete. As for pot-boiler series written at Grade 3 level -- why waste editing on books for the barely literate? One series that had some serious adventure used to be written by one man; his publisher got it away from him and hired flacks who churn them out at a lower reading level with the morphing mentioned earlier. My friend who read the early entries was furious! But the publisher is happy because he can sell so many more copies of each book.

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