Dear Naomi Novik,

[blamebrampton]

I am still hugely enjoying the Temeraire books, but please, for the love of tiny bunnies, hire an actual editor to proofread your novels! The typos! They burn!

(I was doing well at ignoring them until we reached the Nemean region, which is in Ancient Greece, not New South Wales. It was rightly the Nepean earlier. Betas are for fanfic, Naomi. I'm sure you've earned enough to pay for a good editor by now!)

Must dash, plot twist has just occurred and I only have time for another hundred pages before bed.

Much love,

Brammers

Comments

[tomatoe18.livejournal.com]

Which publisher? I can't believe there are typos! Del Rey and HarperCollins are supposedly good with providing editors for their authors!

[i-autumnheart.livejournal.com]

I read the first two over the weekend, inspired by your rec the other day. I enjoyed both, but they're not really leaving me with that OMG, must read the next one NOW feeling... do they get better?

The wordbuilding is excellent, and the draconic characters are well done, but so far the plot seems to be mostly an excuse to explore the scenary than an exercise in what-will-happen-next. I'd have liked to see more depth in the characterisation in the China scenes, especially

I wonder if part of it is that it's a YA novel where the coming-of-age story belongs to the non-human partner? Whatever it is, I'm not quite relating.

[hollyxu.livejournal.com]

I loved the first book (read it ages ago, when it first came out) but then I hit the China bits and decided that getting increasingly annoyed at a book wasn't worth the blood pressure, and stopped. Is the world-building in other sequels worth it? Because I have a rather large problem with her attitude towards non-English portrayals.

[chantefable.livejournal.com]

Oh, typos are incredibly distracting, particularly when you are immersed in a book - they just jump out and poke you in the eye...

Which reminds me of yesterday when I groaned at a typo in the major characters' surname in the book I was reading. It's not like the majority of the characters belong to that clan, and their surname is mentioned five times on each page. There is no way to get it right. It actually jolted me out of an interesting plot moment. Tiny bunnies are sad.

Is there a bolshedragon revolution yet?

[symetric.livejournal.com]

*despairs* i keep meaning to pick up her books but it just slips my mind each time i'm looking for a new read.

...i've got nothing. happy reading the rest? :p

[meredyth-13.livejournal.com]

I sadly gave up on this series - while I really liked the first book, and made my way through the second, I'm afraid I'm not a person who deals well with the frustrations of idiotic politics or the constant thwarting of the lead characters. I need my happy times, and her books deliver very little in the way of happy times. When I looked at the next couple, all I could see was an ongoing struggle and downward spiral of misery, and I just wasn't up to that.

I guess typos were the least of my problems.

Of course, I have managed (at much earlier times in my life) to read two books in sequence, where in the first a robot character is called Bollux and in the second Zollux (no explanation given, except I think that someone recognised that Bollux may have an interesting connotation in various parts of the world that aren't the US of A), and the two novelisations of the Man from Snowy River movies, where in one his horse is called Dany and in the other Andy. Go figure!

I don't mind not reading more of her Dragon books - but I do wish she'd write more Merlin fic. ;)

[annafugazzi.livejournal.com]

Funny the things that snag your eye as you scroll past... I grew up in Nepean. I'd be miffed if someone suddenly moved me to Ancient Greece ;)

[jolinar-rosha.livejournal.com]

ooh, I've been meaning to read these books! I can sympathise with you - glaring errors in published popular books annoy me to no end. Don't they have editors for that?