The Trials of Apollo, Book Four: The Tyrant's Tomb; Rick Riordan; 2019

In this edition of the annals of bad editing:

Reyna conceded this with a nod.  "For years, I was supposed to be a good little sister to Hylla in a tough family situation.  Then, on Calypso's island, I was supposed to be an obedient servant. [...]"

Calypso, of course, was alone on her island.  Reyna and Hylla were Circe's servants.

Vergil in Averno; Avram Davidson; 1987

This edition of adventures in bad editing:

Armin, all eyes at the work of sorting the jewel-stone, and at the show of the sparkles themselves, seemed to have heard nor seen nothing of this brief scene.

Page 39 of the 1987 Doubleday hardcover.  This is a shame, because there's a nice bit higher up the page.  Vergil has spent this evening talking to a man, who tells him of the blind jeweler of Averno, and soon the two are beating on the jeweler's door at a late hour.

At the exact moment his outburst ceased, one half of the upper half of the door (they were not notably trusting in Averno) was opened; there stood a man with a lamp in his hand and in the other he held a polished plate to magnify and reflect the light.  "Come now, Messer Armin," said this one, "is all this clamor and commotion needed?  Will not morning--"

Armin (at last! the man's name!  Vergil had had a sort of shyness in asking to begin with, and then the longer the time had passed without his being told it . . . ah well: "Armin."  So.) [...]

From the perspective of someone who is bad with names, this beautifully captures the embarrassment of not knowing, and eventual release of discomfort when a name is finally revealed.

But... "[He] seemed to have heard nor seen nothing".  I had been struggling to engage with the story up to this point, and so this provided the excuse not to continue.

Innumeracy in the work of Jonathan Safran Foer

... or, specifically, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.  I feel like I know this narrator, but then:

Page 40 of the 2005 hardcover states

"More than 9 million people live in New York (a baby is born in New York every 50 seconds)".

Even without looking it up, I know this is obviously wrong.  9 million is very roughly 1/700 of the world population, so if the NYC birthrate is 1/50sec (and roughly equal to the worldwide birthrate), then more than 10 people are being born worldwide every second.  Last I checked, it was more like 1 every 4 seconds or so.

But we can get the right numbers.  See https://a816-healthpsi.nyc.gov/epiquery/Birth/, for example, and we see that there were 122,937 births in NYC in 2002.  That's (122,937/24)/60 = about 14 every hour, or one every 4 minutes and 16 seconds.

I know that the narrator is a child, but a child's mistake (in particular, *this* child's mistake) is to calculate 18 as the number of locks per person in NYC and then assume, as part of their calculations on how quickly he could try every lock in NYC, that 18 new locks come into being every time someone is born in NYC.  *This* child would not make a simple error in arithmetic, or fail to look up readily available facts.

Speaking of that calculation, on the next page it states,

"I figured out that if a baby is born in New York every 50 seconds, and each person has 18 locks, a new lock is created in New York every 2.777 [with a vinculum over the 7s] seconds."  

That is fine as far as it goes, since 50/18=2.777; (hah, turns out it was easy to add the overline with HTML markup) however, it then goes on to say

"So even if all I did was open locks, I'd still be falling behind by .333 [with vinculum] locks every second. [under the experimental evidence that it takes 3 seconds to open a lock]"

But 3-2.777 is .222, not .333.  Again, not a mistake *this* child would make.

This is me becoming increasingly disappointed with the physical world.  I had to stop reading this and go back to Fool Moon last night because I didn't want to lose this page before writing this post, and Fool Moon was the only other book on the bedstand.

He arose from slumber and noted the ferrous-like qualities of his cloven nose

A while ago, sometime after finishing A Feast for Crows and during the 6 year wait for A Dance with Dragons, I promised not to read any more of a Song of Ice and Fire until the series was finished.  The TV series is making me break that promise, so here I am reading A Dance with Dragons. 

Without spoiling anything, the first chapter after the prologue is from Tyrion's POV.  Within it, we are told:

He woke naked on a goose-down feather bed so soft it felt as if he had been swallowed by a cloud.  His tongue was growing hair and his throat was raw, but his cock was as hard as an iron bar.  [emphasis mine]

Dozens of pages later, but in the very next Tyrion chapter:

When he woke his stunted legs were stiff as iron. [again, emphasis mine]

I'm hoping that this is the start of a book-long, nay, rest of the series-long in-joke by the author in which every Tyrion chapter has him wake up and compare some part of his body to the element with atomic number 26.

Inheritance; Lan Samantha Chang; 2004

Lan Samantha Chang leaves her Hunger comfort zone of the Chinese-American experience and the short form to write Inheritance: a Novel of a Chinese family in the years leading up to WWII (and not about dragons).  While I think Hunger is a much stronger work, this is still worth a read, if only to get to "The Lake of Dreams" section of the book.  In fact, I might even recommend forgoing the first 250 pages and reading "The Lake of Dreams" as a novella.  It would be somewhat rough going, not being able to immediately place every name in relation to the narrator, but that disorientation resolves itself as you read on.

Sadly, Inheritance also enters the Annals of Bad Editing for the following:

Hsiao Taitai held the reigns...  [pg 119 of the first edition hardcover]

and then

He had the room for one [a maid]; and he liked the idea of a young woman, one of these wasp-wasted... [pg 125]

It was the second typo, within 6 pages of the first, that riled me.  Someone get the copyeditor more coffee!

[note: post backdated to when I originally finished the novel and wrote up notes on it, but actually published on 8/25/2013]

The Woman Who Died a Lot; Jasper Fforde; 2012

The winner of this week's bad editing award goes to the following exchange between Thursday Next and her husband, Landen.

"What was I supposed to say?" replied Landen. "... did you get into Image Ink this morning?"

"I forgot again."

"Me, too.  Twice.  Hang on," I added.

Or, if we want to be generous, maybe it was just a clever use of the mindworm.

There are two completely independent plots running through this book, one of which is resolved by the introduction of an entirely new character a few pages from the conclusion of that storyline.  It doesn't work.  

There are still some good parts in the seventh Thursday Next novel, but I don't think I'll be reading the eighth.

Rogue Dragon; Avram Davidson; 1965

Another Nebula finalist.  This starts off with a great description of a dragon hunt, eventually gets lost and muddles through the middle, and then ends tolerably well.  Paul Brooks' Amazon review from 2 years ago excellently explains what went wrong, I think.  Now I want to read the original 58-page story... still, at under 150 pages for the entire "expanded" novel, the filler isn't too painful.

Rogue Dragon also has the following contribution to the Annals of Bad Editing [my comments in square brackets]:

The loft lay at the top of a teetering old tenement deep in the festering slums of Old Drogue.  Below, illicit win was made from wild grapes, and unlicensed tobacco cured and sold; the [there?] was an inn - de facto, not de jure - which kept no register of those who found cheap if uncertain slumber on the rag beds of it's [aaaarrgggh!] frousty [spelled with the alternate "frowsty" on a later page] floor; an entire establishment of ladies officially if not all actually young, who failing any gainful skills above a certain level, got their living by the use of such passive skills as lay beneath it; and a number of seamstresses and tailors who lacked time and place and perhaps inclination to weave the cloths they cut and sewed, depending instead on the activities of those who preferred not to vex the original owners with the tiresome bookkeeping inseparable from purchase.

There are plenty of typographical errors in this edition, but in addition to the typos, this passage is a beautiful example of when to kill your darlings, or, at the very least, turn some of those semi-colons into periods.

Lastly, the back cover 2009 IDW paperback declares "Was Avram Davidson the Greatest Fantasist of the 20th Century?  Very likely."  

WAT

You could make the case he's the best fantasist I'd never heard of before working through the Nebula finalists list, but better than Gene Wolfe, Ursula LeGuin, and Stephen King (who are mentioned by name on the back cover), not to mention that guy who wrote about those short people trying to get rid of some oppressive jewelry?!!?  I hear he was pretty good, too.  Hell, if we want to talk dragons in an SF setting, I may have guilty-pleasure enjoyed Dragonriders of Pern more than Rogue Dragon.

The Genocides; Thomas Disch; 1965

Another notch on the list of Nebula finalists.  I recall liking 334, but have no notes other than that it earned a place in the annals of bad editing:

On page 92 of the Gregg Press Science Fiction Series of Thomas Disch's 334, he talks about changing the value of c in a parabola

y = x^2 + c

in order to change the width of the parabola.

Oi.  I also read On Wings of Song some time ago, but don't recall much about it except that I didn't particularly like it.

The Genocides isn't bad.  He has a good premise and manages to tell most of the story from the POV of his characters without dropping into "god view" to explain what the heck is going on; unfortunately, his primary characters are so unlikable that I feel relief, rather than remorse, at the prospect of the end of the world.  We need someone to root for, even if they're doomed!**  Still, there are some good bits, and at under 150 pages, it's a relatively small gamble of your time.  This paragraph was my favorite (page 30 of the 2000 Vintage Books paperback edition):

They had lived these last three years in the safe-deposit vault in the basement of the First American National Bank.  Their precious store of scavenged cans and jars was still locked in the safe deposit boxes, and the canary was probably in his cage in the corner.  It had been a very cozy home, though there were few visitors and they had had to kill most of those.  Such luck couldn't last forever.

** I'm pretty sure I'm "supposed" to root for Orville, but I can't.