4 Popular Books With Typos and Grammar Errors

Typos, grammar errors, homonym errors, usage errors, and many other technical problems, have plagued writers for decades. Readers and bookworms have their opinions on them - some not being bothered, while others just straight up don't even finish the book. Indeed, there is a consensus that one typo is okay but consistent errors can pull a reader out of the story (and may result in bad ratings). I think of them as similar to glitches in video games. Every video game has glitches; there's no such thing as an ultra-polished game.

Typos and other errors have been a characteristic predominantly connected to indie-published books. But sometimes even traditionally published books, with their armies of editors and proofreaders, can still be a victim. Would you believe that even some classics are just as bad, or even worse, as any unedited self-published title you'll find in kindle?

This is a list of critically acclaimed books that... actually have bad writing.

Blood Meridian

Good ol' Cormac McCarthy is known for his unorthodox way of writing and sentence structures but even his biblical prose is not perfect. One might even say that his magnum opus, Blood Meridian, is a damn unreadable piece of fiction that makes you question if McCarthy has even read a single novel in his life. Case in point, the most glaring typo you'll find in Blood Meridian is "bowieknife", which isn't a problem if it's in the dialogue, but you see it too much in the prose and you can't help but not see it. There are other typos and grammar errors in this book, but if you'd like to know more about them, check out my Blood Meridian review.

The Dying Earth

This legendary sci-fi anthology book from the great Jack Vance is still a great work of mythopoeia. But one can hardly notice the many technical problems it has. I have both the Timescape paperback, epub, and mobi, and across every version, some of the typos, grammar problems, and errors, have been consistent. There are missing periods and quotation marks, some weird wordings, and some obvious typos (“Strangely, be did not take the flute from his mouth”). I have shown this to my literary friends and they said that those errors were probably because, back then, writers had to write hastily to reach deadlines and quotas, especially for pulp magazines in which Jack Vance wrote his stories in.

Ready Player One

Okay, maybe calling Ernest Cline's geek epic Ready Player One critically acclaimed might get some of you laughing and shaking your heads, but even with its grand Wikipedia-style of writing, and great editors like Julian Pavia, the book still cannot escape error-land. If there's one thing that Ernest Cline is bad at, it's in the dates. For example, supporting character Aech was kicked out of her mom's house when she turned 18, resulting in her spending many years homeless and inside an RV. I couldn't help but laugh then when I found out that even after living for many years homeless, she's still 19-years-old. Yes! 19! Not only that but there's also Cline getting his video games wrong. The way Parzival got extra credits in Tempest is so wrong that it makes you doubt whether Cline really is a geek. Most of these problems would get polished in newer versions of the book, but for those who got stuck beta-reading the first edition? Good luck!

Survivor

I'm actually surprised by this because I've known the characters of satirist Chuck Palahniuk to be a bit coo-coo in the head, so I thought that maybe the misspellings are intentional in Survivor. Its story centered around a guy who hijacked a plane and now began to narrate his whole life leading to that point. Didn't know people in Oregon spelled their "your" as "you're" though. But seriously, this novel by Chuck is filled with many grammatical errors that it just makes you shrink and hope to God it'll all be over. I mean, the story is good and interesting, but having to read lines like “After moments like this, you're whole life is gravy”, forces me to wonder why self-published books get a bad rep even if publishers release dumb writings like this.

So here's my list. Lesson you should have learned? Don't be bothered by errors. Even the literary goats have them.