I'm sure most of us love to fully immerse ourselves in fictitious worlds from time to time. But there's really nothing worse than a detail in a book that brings you straight back into reality...
So, when u/korehanan asked "What's a silly detail in a book that ruined it for you?" I decided to round up some of the best answers:
1. "I've blocked the book from my mind, but there was one set in Regency or Victorian England where the author kept screwing up people's titles."
2. "A John Grisham character getting a bagel at Café du Monde in New Orleans. But, in real life they only serve beignets and those are nothing like bagels."
"If he‘d wanted to use an alternate item because he thought beignet was too foreign a term, he could have chosen better. Powdered sugar donut would be less egregious!"
3. "In Where the Crawdads Sing, the fact that everyone went to Asheville for an errand when it is so far from the coast of North Carolina. Did they even look at a map of the state?"
"Without interstate highways at that time, it would have been an 8-10 hour drive."
4. I was a teenager living in Northern Ireland and reading It by Stephen King which is set in Derry (I assumed that meant the Derry in Northern Ireland). Bangor and Castlerock are also mentioned in the book."
5. "The main character and love interest were both children of musicians. Main character's name was Melody, which, ok, is a little on the nose but it's a legit name. Love interest's name? Rhythm. I just could not take it seriously."
6. "In Leigh Bardugo's Grisha books, people are constantly getting drunk on kvass, which is a fermented beverage with about 0.5% alcohol (about as much as a 'non-alcoholic' beer)."
7. "A very well-reviewed and honestly well-written book described a scene of a 16th or 17th century ghetto and the house had a bathing room with indoor plumbing. My mind just kept sticking on that point — I couldn't let it go even though the book was excellent."
8. "Nothing yanks me out of a story faster then when characters pour themselves a drink, take one sip, and then start spilling their guts and lose all verbal filter because the alcohol 'pulsing through their veins'. What are you drinking to have it hit you that hard that fast?!"
9. "I read a historical romance novel once where the love interest was supposed to have slept with 5,000 women. This guy had either lied about going to battle all those times and had done nothing but slept with multiple people all day long every day for YEARS, or the author didn’t actually think through what an utterly staggering amount of people 5,000 actually was."
10. I recently read a book set in the UK, and the phrase 'that cost a pretty pence' was used in dialogue. Even as an American, I know the singular form of 'pence' is penny. There were other little details like that throughout (date formats being written American-style), and it would throw me off whenever it came up."
11. "In a sci-fi novel they had discovered some new wonder metal that was so amazing and in demand it was super expensive. Near the start of the book the character travels by train and it’s mentioned the rails are made of this substance. So, this rare and pricey metal is used for train tracks for miles and miles?"
12. "Legendborn took place on my college’s campus and the author apparently went there, but I say apparently because it was written like the author had done a skim of UNC’s wiki page and went from that."
"Places were either made up or put in the wrong place on campus, but the mistake that just completely took me out of the book was her saying that UNC was playing NC State for the first game of the football season on a Sunday. Even a quick Google search should let you know that college football is played on Thursday and Saturday, and UNC vs NC State is ALWAYS the last regular season game of the year and is ALWAYS played on Thanksgiving weekend."
13. "When authors have a Latino character pepper their dialogue with random Spanish words. We don't really do that, especially when among non-speakers. The author will have a character named Maria Ramirez, and have her use random Spanish words, in italics, just to remind you that hey, she's Latina."
14. "I don’t remember the book anymore, but there was a line where the main character mentioned that she found out her baby was a girl in her ultrasound. This was in the late '70s, and that was not a visible detail in ultrasounds back then."
15. "The main character in Bunny by Mona Awad repeatedly calls Mac lipstick in the shade Lady Danger a 'cool, blue red'. It is not. It is a full on warm, orange red. Nothing cool toned about it."
16. "Most books that use horses as transport. They cover large distances, rarely go lame, and can always find food for them. They need to eat for hours, sleep, and carrying oats is not particularly practical."
17. "All Good People Here by Ashley Flowers had a character who had just graduated from high school say that during his sophomore year, a teacher thought he was a Satanist because he listened to Nirvana. The issue? The scene was set in 1987, which was the year Nirvana formed and two years before they even released their first studio album."
18. "In Throne of Glass the character says 'I'm going to stay in this competition' and resolves herself. Then in the next chapter the ghost of a dead queen goes 'you need to stay in the competition' and the character agrees. You had the same resolution happen twice. CUT ONE OUT."
19. "A book where the main character was a baker. Someone asked him why their cake wasn't as good as his, and he shared his secret recipe with them. It was vanilla. The secret recipe for the cake was vanilla. I was so mad, it's all I could think about for the rest of the book."
20. "It was a thriller about a woman escaping an abusive relationship by moving to Cornwall or somewhere similar. But what I’ve never forgotten is the description of her love interest, who was said to have 'studied veterinary medicine at the University of Leeds'. Leeds does not have a veterinary school, and given that this is such an easy thing to look up it still irritates me even years later."
21. "When someone lowers their voice 'a few octaves'. That's a lot lower than you think!"
H/T to u/korehanan and r/books for having this discussion!
Note: All submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.