How can you read a book when the facts are wrong?

For me this ties into suspension of disbelief. It's a fluid thing. The author should be accurate enough to keep the audience from saying "wait a minute..". You don't want to restrict the imagination, but glaring errors aren't good either. I don't think we can draw a hard line.

Wait, there's no hedgehogs in North America? I am bummed.

I dunno. It depends. A deal-breaker for me has always been if they recite the http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/10percent.asp ten percent myth, but I have a feeling that a good author might be able to pull that off. So this is me shrugging my shoulders.

A few things I can ignore, especially if I am reading books published many decades ago.

But when an author continuously makes those type of mistakes, then I usually just close the book and put it aside.

chompers said:

Wait, there's no hedgehogs in North America? I am bummed.

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I did not know that. How about badgers? We could ship over some UK ones to avoid having them culled, and some of our excess red deer population.

reiver33 said:

I did not know that. How about badgers? We could ship over some UK ones to avoid having them culled, and some of our excess red deer population.

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North America has badgers, but they're funny lookin' badgers.

No, we got badgers in North America. They're flipping cool! I haven't seen one in years and years, but it's a sight. I'm not sure how closely related they are to yours. And we have porcupines, which are not nearly as cuddly as hedgehogs.

Why did the chicken cross the road? To prove to the opossum and the armadillo that it could be done.

But to the OP, with Google street maps and other resources, there is no excuse for errors like that. Even so, going there is the best way to do research. I set a novel in Nashville, and put a trendy night club area in a part of town that any native would have laughed his butt off had he read it.

I was wondering whether hedgehogs was a translation error, but that doesn't explain the problem with location.

Them poor little armadillos, trying to scurry across the roads as fast as their stumpy little legs can carry them. They're often roadkill over here.

And *cough* so that I don't get reprimanded for derailing, I once read a book where the MC gave her dog chocolates every night as a treat. Granted, this was an older book, but I thought it was common knowledge that chocolate is poisonous to dogs. I think I left the book unfinished after that.

I'm with thothguard -- a few errors I can just ignore and overlook, but when they are glaring errors that jump out to me, I can't keep reading.

jeffo said:

I'm with thothguard -- a few errors I can just ignore and overlook, but when they are glaring errors that jump out to me, I can't keep reading.

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Ditto. Though it also depends on the subject matter and my own knowledge of it. If it's something I'm intimately familiar with -- a particular historical era that I frequently study, a city I know very well, a sport I play, etc. -- then even the milder mistakes can be jarring enough to pull me out of the story. I actually shy away from a lot of World War II and contemporary military fiction because of that. I read something a while back where enlisted Sailors kept calling a Chief "Sir", and that was enough to make me put the book down.

Incidentally, I once had a reader send me a lengthy e-mail detailing everything I had done wrong in a book involving horses, concluding it with a comment about how "...it's not that big of a deal -- they're mistakes I would expect from anyone without firsthand experience with horses, especially horses involved in competition."

It took every bit of a willpower I had not to write back and thank her for the information, and that perhaps I should have done more research rather than going off 20+ years experience with show horses...

Hublocker said:

...
Even in fiction, shouldn't an author pay some attention to accuracy, particularly when describing a real location?

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Yes, absolutely, unless it's some weirdo fantasy or something where "getting the facts wrong" is part of the story. From looking at the Amazon page, this isn't that at all. It's some sort of mystery novel.

From your description I wondered if it were an independent or self-published book - no, as the editorial review says at the start, it has a positive review on NPR, which surely spurred sales. I haven't heard of the publisher, Quercus. Googling to see if it's some imprint of the Big Five (Four? Three???), I see it's a UK publisher:
http://www.quercusbooks.co.uk/

The "good" part is Amazon has over 100 reviews, and they're pretty equally distributed across 1 to 5 stars. I didn't read them all, but I found this among the 1-star reviews:

I was increasingly put off by sloppy editing (grammatical errors, a "ladybug" on one page becomes a "ladybird" on the next, etc.). The passages about the science of dinosaurs felt at times like copied and clumsily inserted from basic textbooks, ...

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This is a translation, and something may have been lost in translation - on the other hand, it may be a "good" translation of a so-so novel. It would have to also be the original book's editors as well as the author who were lax in doing research on some facts. But as they may see it, it's set on another continent, so they may think why check things out, or it never occurs to them to do so. But then, it apparently sold enough and got good enough reviews to be translated and republished where the lack of research becomes obvious.

This is one of the scary things for me as a "potential" author - I've got a NaNoWriMo novel I like and think has promise, but I worry about what I have no clue about but that doesn't add up for a reader knowledgeable in an area that I'm not. This points out what I've been reading here over the years, there's a lot more to a publishable novel than the first draft - making it publishable may take several times longer than writing the first draft. I'd certainly want a good publisher with good editors to help with such things, rather than end up with a book like this that gets such mixed reviews.

Hublocker said:

There is this book called The Dinosaur Feather by S.J. Gazan in which one of the main characters works at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, B.C., Canada.

He cycles to work on on a daily basis. From Vancouver Island.

Vancouver Island is a two hour ferry ride away from the city of Vancouver, not to mention a 45- minute drive just to get to the ferry terminal.

Then she has this character, a biologist, going into the woods and capturing hedgehogs to dissect. There are no hedgehogs in North America.

Then he goes camping in the nearby woods and listens to the wapiti deer roar.

Al least we do have wapiti in B.C., but you don't just hear them hooting like owls when you go camping. They do it for about 2 weeks a year and only in places far from Vancouver.

That book won all kinds of awards and praise but after seeing those kinds of blatant errors in a book, I don't have any confidence that the author has any credibility.

Even in fiction, shouldn't an author pay some attention to accuracy, particularly when describing a real location?

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Stories about academics that have no understanding of how academia actually works already make me want to throw a book against the wall. Gross biological errors really make my head hurt, especially in the age of the internet when it's relatively easy to pop online and discover which animals are native to an area or when Wapiti deer actually rut, or how far it is from Vancouver island to Vancouver for that matter.

If a book racks up enough of these kinds of errors, I wonder how many others are in it that I didn't notice.

Emermouse said:

I dunno. It depends. A deal-breaker for me has always been if they recite the http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/10percent.asp ten percent myth, but I have a feeling that a good author might be able to pull that off. So this is me shrugging my shoulders.

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I still often see the left-brain-right-brain (one side being "feeling," the other being "feeling and logical") thing I recall from decades ago (ISTR there was a popular book describing it), though I've read it's been discounted. Here's something on it:
http://psychology.about.com/od/cognitivepsychology/a/left-brain-right-brain.htm

Free fiction idea:

"So, you mean it's TRUE that we only use ten percent of our brains?"

"No, not at all, that's a myth. That figure is totally wrong."

"Huh? What do you mean? What are you saying?"

"It's more line zero point one percent. But here at The Big University Brain Research Institute, we're learning how to use the majority of our brains."

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Hublocker said:

Even in fiction, shouldn't an author pay some attention to accuracy, particularly when describing a real location?

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Should they pay attention? I don't know, honestly. Parts of me would like that they do, but other parts of me don't give two figs if they're telling an otherwise enjoyable story.

Like others upthread, when a story gets facts wrong that I know are wrong, it can bother me--but if it does bother me, then I'm not as engrossed in the story as I'd like to be, so it's a problem on a deeper level, IMO.

Thing is, the vast majority of readers don't know such details and won't be bothered by them. There will always be one reader who is so put-out about a glaring error that they will write long explanations to the author, but in general, the majority of readers don't seem to give two figs, or enough of a fig to let it bother them. I see it as a toss-up and very much the author's decision of how much research to do and to put into their work. If enough readers sees it as a problem, their sales drop and that puts the writer in a position of figuring out the problem and fixing it or stop writing.

Hublocker said:

Danish word pindsvin

English word is hedgehog

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Danish word hulepindsvin

English word is porcupine