Today’s recurring complaint: fictional books that the authors didn’t bother to make less fictional by getting facts right. 

I am happy to indulge in fantasy stories. I have no problems with books with worlds turned sideways or perched on turtles all the way down. If the sky is puce, butterflies are apex predators and Benjamin Franklin can turn himself into a bird and morph from a wild turkey into a bald eagle, I am perfectly content. 

When reading a NONfantasy fiction book, I still try to suspend disbelief. Until Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! slaps me in the face, holds me down and won’t let me up.

It’s OK, I tell myself, it’s just a minor detail. The story’s still rolling along well. I am happy to give the author another chance.

No, I am lying. Because now I am suspicious and on the lookout for more  “alternative facts.” Still, I love to read and I want to love what I am reading.

But if the author puts us in a world where gravity works, we recognize the cars from TV ads in real scenic settings, and time goes in only one direction, then she shouldn’t have an inspirational ornithology professor tell her college class that Ben Franklin is why the bald eagle is the national bird.  

Perhaps I shouldn’t care if the author is not familiar with the very, very common notion most of us learned in fourth grade, that Ben Franklin was unimpressed with eagles. Here’s Ben, writing to his daughter: “Bald Eagle...is a Bird of bad moral Character. He does not get his Living honestly… [he] is too lazy to fish for himself ... the turkey is a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America.., besides, though a little vain & silly, a Bird of Courage.” 

If we are generous to the author, we could posit she thinks the other founding fathers really hated Franklin and chose the rapscalliony bald eagle to spite him, and that’s why Franklin is the cause of the bald eagle being our national bird.  Which is a bit generous to her, and a bit disrespectful to him. I think Franklin deserves better.

Forget it, I tell myself, it’s fiction. But still, this should not be hard. 

So I continue merrily reading along, when suddenly, on the page, the expert baker is making a yeast sponge to prepare her Irish soda bread.

Irish soda bread is so named because it uses baking SODA instead of yeast as its leavening agent.  OK, that one’s ambiguous. The baker does decide to make the bread after she’s started the yeast, so it’s not conclusively wrong, but since the Ben Franklin thing, I am dubious. 

Now I’m irritated. I’ll gripe about it in my book group, but I rather think they are getting a bit fed up with my grumps. 

And that’s just one book. Another novel focused on a mysterious stranger who comes to town; everyone falls in love with her. She grows bonsai trees, carefully re-wrapping their little trunks and branches every night to prevent them from getting scarred from the shaping wires. Which is not legitimate bonsai. Scars from the wires are a result of the process and considered beautiful.

A series set in the European Dark Ages, recommended to me as well researched, mentioned a character’s daughter who had died while away at her school. There were no schools for young ladies in the Dark Ages. And why does a character talk in Shakespearean iambic pentameter five hundred years before Shakespeare? 

Sometimes nonfiction books unintentionally lapse into fiction/nonsense.  Consider a tale of meeting an octopus, in which the author describes touching it as being “impossible to tell how long it lasted.” Because she had no phone or even a watch, perhaps? Or never learned to tell time? In which case, I suggest she learn before she embarks upon trying to educate us in another book. 

I am frustrated when I’m lured into what seems like a good story, the plot is moving right along and and then I’m gobsmacked by falsity.

Years ago, I was waiting for the bus along with a nicely dressed, well groomed middle-aged woman, older than I then but younger than me now.  We chatted a bit before the bus came. She pointed out the moon in the daylight sky and, in her pleasant voice, said the moon had never been seen during the day before a black man became president. 

Factual errors in books are like that to me—sweet looking but really a bit scary, because who then can you trust? Not the authors. We edge away from them a little bit, kind of checking around to see if we’re safe, because we’re not sure what might happen next from a person clearly distinct from reality.  Yes, there are other people near—OK, they seem to be visiting the parole office down the street; oh whew, the bus is here.  

Even worse for my psychic health is coming across a statement that I am confused by. Not knowing if a line is true or not leaves my mind as unsettled as if it’s wobbling on the fulcrum of a teeter-totter. 

Can anyone versed in British law tell me if a murdered corpse is considered physical evidence that cannot be released to its family until someone has been found guilty of its death?  

Because I don’t know how to look that up and it’s driving me crazy.