“Lord, grant me the serenity to accept stupid people as they are,
The fortitude to maintain self-control,
And the wisdom to know that if I give them what they deserve, I’ll end up in jail.”
Anyone else want that on a T-Shirt?
Oh, Come On! My Standards Aren’t That High!
Well, not an auspicious beginning to the New Year. I decided to clear out the underbrush in my ebook backlog a bit and started in reading some books I’d been meaning to get to for a while.
So far, it’s not noon, yet, and I’ve started three of ’em. Put two down. Deleted them from my devices. Not going to finish them.
An example: after wading through multiple problems in noun-verb agreement, pronoun confusion and even misuse–“their” for “its” one too many times in descriptive narrative (not dialog, where it is remotely possible I might excuse such things, depending on the character), for one, and anachronisms in a 1920s setting–I saw “balled out” used for “scolding” and just couldn’t take any more of that book.
And this was an ebook from an established publishing house, not an “indie” so there were NO possible excuses for such incompetent editing. Are there just fewer and fewer literate “proofreaders” and editors, or are publishing houses just shoving unedited “advance reader copies” out the door, thinking that ebook readers are less literate than hardcopy readers?
Maybe it’s even worse, but I don’t want to contemplate that. *sigh*
So now I’m reading a book that was touted/blurbed as sci-fi which appears to really be a “slapstick comedy sci-fi romance novel”. *sigh* Please, next time just give an accurate description. At least it’s amusing and written halfway literately.
*sigh* At least I have more than a few hardcopy books also stacked up in my “to read” list to take refuge in–books not published in these days of illiterate boob “proofreaders/editors”.