How anal of a reader are you?

[Nicole]

Okay, I think I must be a reader that gets in my own way. I'm reading Sanderson's Mistborn and I'm hung up on his using an alloy as one of his metals. It's not a biggie, really. But it's not the first time my persnickety mind holds me back (fighting scenes, medical feasibility and don't get me started on space scenes). I mean, we read to get lost, right? Do you swallow what the author feeds you easily or are you like me, narrow eyed and needing to be convinced? And if you are nitpicky, how do you discern which reads are good? Popularity is not quite the right meter stick.

Basically, I'm saying I have issues and hope I'm not the only one!

What about you?

[Kristenelle]

I'm like that in select circumstances. Often I don't notice things, but when a character has been in a massive amount of danger for an extended length of time - that can really bring me out of the story. Like, the movie Gravity. Realistically, that character would have died in the first five minutes. Then, ok, she got lucky, but she should have definitely died again in the next five minutes. The entire movie was like that and I couldn't stand it.

[Allan]

I may notice things, but I typically treat it on a suspension of disbelief scale. It has to be really blatant and ridiculous for it to irritate me. Why get bogged down in little things? That would spoil my reading and slow me down. I read it and just mark the book down if it doesn’t come together.

[Gabi]

For me that depends solely on the ability of the author to draw me into their story. If the characters or plot has me in its grip I'm going with the flow and minor logical discrepancies don't bother me at all. I often come out of a book I was completely mesmerized with only to find reviews that tear it apart because of logical reasons.
On the other hand, if I don't care for characters or plot or writing style I tend to nitpick a lot down to ruining my own entertainment.

[Kateblue]

Some things will bug me a lot and some things won't.

What really brings me out of my suspension of disbelief more than anything is bad world usage, punctuation, sentence structure, etc etc.

Or, another sore point, blatant factual errors in the worldbuilding (here, the term "worldbuilding" could just be in our world.) Though it is rare when I know enough about a subject to have that problem.

That seem to be like your "alloy" problem, Nicole. Is the metal something that might be found as an alloy in nature and the people of Mistworld don't have the ability to know that or separate the elements?

[Oleksandr]

I am with others here, who say it depends on a book/story. For example, in Skyward I disliked the idea that the adolescent protagonist live on rat meat diet for years, without getting scurvy or any other vitamin/mineral deficiency

[Nicole]

Yeah, I think that's the case. It's really a little thing plot-wise but it's like my mind wants to find things wrong. Stop it mind! I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one. In retrospect I agree: generally if it's captivating enough I can overlook things. (Not to say Mistborn isn't captivating -- it totally is!)


Kateblue wrote: "Some things will bug me a lot and some things won't.

What really brings me out of my suspension of disbelief more than anything is bad world usage, punctuation, sentence structure, etc etc.

Or,..."

[Nicole]

Yeah, that would have totally brought me out of it!

Oleksandr wrote: "I am with others here, who say it depends on a book/story. For example, in Skyward I disliked the idea that the adolescent protagonist live on rat meat diet for years, without getti..."