Barbarossa
November 28th, 2001, 11:11 PM
I would be interested if other people here become nitpickers too in special cases?
I'm usually quite tolerant to details and allow stories to suck me in, but in certain cases details just stand out so much they distruct me from the story and awake the nitpicker in me.
For example "the baker boy"by J.V. Jones.
Usually I wouldn't mind if an author knows anything about baking or not. But if you name your book after an hero who is a baker, I find total ignorance of old baking methods and the problem of baking with wood stoves, really offputting.
*********Minor spoiler********
**********************************
For those who want to know:
A key scene in the book is when the hero first demonstrates magical powers, after he lets some loafs burn by stoking the fire too much.
Now it would be totally impossible to bake loafs in oven heated by an ongoing wood fire.
You would never get the kind of regular heat
you need, the loaves would burn on the fire side.
What people actually would do is to make the fire in the oven itself, let it burn for a whole day, till thick loam walls had stored the heat, then brush out the embers and insert the loaves.
You can leave laves too long that way, so the harden too much, but you can't burn them.
People were still baking that way in rural areas not far from my hometown in my lifetime, some of the ovens being as old as the villages (up to 800 years).
****************Spoiler end**************
Does anyone get irked in similar ways by other books?
I'm usually quite tolerant to details and allow stories to suck me in, but in certain cases details just stand out so much they distruct me from the story and awake the nitpicker in me.
For example "the baker boy"by J.V. Jones.
Usually I wouldn't mind if an author knows anything about baking or not. But if you name your book after an hero who is a baker, I find total ignorance of old baking methods and the problem of baking with wood stoves, really offputting.
*********Minor spoiler********
**********************************
For those who want to know:
A key scene in the book is when the hero first demonstrates magical powers, after he lets some loafs burn by stoking the fire too much.
Now it would be totally impossible to bake loafs in oven heated by an ongoing wood fire.
You would never get the kind of regular heat
you need, the loaves would burn on the fire side.
What people actually would do is to make the fire in the oven itself, let it burn for a whole day, till thick loam walls had stored the heat, then brush out the embers and insert the loaves.
You can leave laves too long that way, so the harden too much, but you can't burn them.
People were still baking that way in rural areas not far from my hometown in my lifetime, some of the ovens being as old as the villages (up to 800 years).
****************Spoiler end**************
Does anyone get irked in similar ways by other books?