Dumbest Literature Mistakes You've Made

Back when I wrote fanfiction (about a decade or so ago) I got into an argument with a fellow fanfic writer over Said Bookism. (I was arguing that the tendency was for newer writers to lean towards the opposite of the trope.) Somehow, the other guy tricked me into criticising a paragraph from an English translation of War And Peace as coming across as bland.

I can't recall the exact passage anymore, but I refuse to recant.

The ability to tell a good story and the ability to write good prose are not Required Secondary Powers. They can and often do occur independently.

When I was a kid I kept telling people that Batman was better than Shakespeare. Oy...

http://www.sporcle.com/games/druhutch/shakespeare-or-batman

So?

Just because it's published doesn't mean it's good.

That is absolutely horrible logic he was using.

True dat.

I've read all kinds of crap that had no right to be published and yet was.

I speak from experience. One time someone copied a segment of Catcher In The Rye for me to critique, in order to prove me "wrong" when I said that the prose was poor.

Why they chose a book that is very much Love It or Hate It and one that is purposely written to be bare bones is beyond me.

I told him as much. Looking back, I think the mistakes were actually:

• Not realising that I was getting tricked.
• Getting into the argument in the first place.

EDIT: Now that I've seen the TV Tropes page for it...

edited 7th Dec '11 11:31:05 PM by Pyrite

Reading Martin Amis.

Idunno, I thought Time's Arrow was good, if gimmicky.

For longer than I'd care to admit I thought that Gadsby and The Great Gatsby were the same book.

I made the mistake of reading Modelland in public where people could see it. (It wasn't considered "cool" to be reading it, but I didn't care. I was curious to see what the fuss was about, it was at the library, so I checked it out.)

edited 10th Dec '11 3:23:24 PM by BlackElephant

And no one bitch slapped you?

I'm kind of surprised that my dormant seventh sense didn't provoke me to hunt you down and do you dere.

Oh my God, Black Elephant! I...I don't know what to say. I'm surprised you didn't spontaneously combust upon opening the book up. That or have your brain liquify leak out from your ears. Are...are you okay?

edited 10th Dec '11 9:40:47 PM by NoirGrimoir

The book was actually pretty funny. (I don't think it was meant to be, though.)

That's a relief. Still wouldn't be caught dead reading it, though.

I made the mistake of reading Atlas Shrugged and thinking I could actually get over the head aches that book gave me and write a scholarship essay about it. I didn't write the essay but if I had it probably would have been several pages of textual sobbing and "Dear God WHY???" [/melodrama]

When I was young, I was a massive The Famous Five fan, but I assumed Enid Blyton was a dude...

Fifteen years later I decide to search up the name on the interwebz on a whim...

Hilarity Ensues

edited 29th Dec '11 9:31:55 AM by ryzvonusef

Shakespeare or Batman game is fun, but not too hard (if it's in iambic pentameter it's probably Shakespeare, if it isn't it's probably Batman).

Though I never had a problem with Lewis Carroll and C.S. Lewis, count me among those confused by Orwell, Welles, and Wells. Also I thought Karl Marx was one of the Marx Brothers till my mid teens, and confused T.S. Eliot with George Eliot.

I may have also once believed that A Christmas Carol originated with Disney, though that might just be my memory playing tricks on me. It was certainly the first version I ever experienced, though, so it's not entirely out of the realm of possibility.

I hate you all. My life was much better before I found out about Modelland. Seriously... what?

When I was way younger, I thought Terry Brooks and Terry Goodkind were one and the same.

I started reading the Discworld novels with Jingo. Bad place to start, it's among the later of those following the Watch with a lot of continuity before it, so I was pretty lost for the entire book. Despite that, it got me hooked on them.

And while reading it, I assumed Detritus the troll was a dwarf-sized and with human features. I did not know about the Discworld's trolls, and I simply pictured him as resembling another Detritus, in La Zizanie.

edited 19th Jun '12 7:28:20 AM by RJSavoy

I thought Camus wrote The Myth of Syphilis.

Crime After Crime. A woefully underused trope.

I thought the title of the thread was about mistakes one made while writing. One of my worst ones was trying to have a first person narrator be lemony and have him come off as insufferable instead.