So during my trip to Colorado for my brother’s graduation I ended up reading 4 books during the intervals where I wasn’t driving. This is pretty typical of me during travel, since it is pretty difficult to do much of anything else in a car (or plane), and my Kindle always has a backlog of books just waiting to be read. I’m not a slow reader by any means, and tend to binge read, so a stretch of several days can see me devour several books in quick succession without any problem at all.
Generally I find that most books I pick up have their good points. This isn’t to say I like everything I read. There are certainly books I pick up and feel ambivalent about as I work my way through them, but I’m generally able to understand what the book is and identify why it doesn’t work for me. Often this just comes down to such fickle things as voice, themes, and my mood at the time. People tend to be natural story tellers, we do it all the time, so in my experience telling an adequate story isn’t all that difficult (telling an exceptional one is another matter, however).
That said there are things I see occasionally that just bug me. It ends up showing that the author just didn’t care, and in every case comes down to a lack of research. This is something I’ve complained about before, though mostly in private, because it is the type of problem that is really easy to avoid. In many cases a simple Google search is all that is required.
I’m not going to name and shame here, because this isn’t a problem I’ve only seen in that book, however I am going to use examples from it to illustrate my point. Writing is quite difficult, I understand, but I feel that only makes it more important to avoid the simple mistakes.
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