All for Naught?

Remember that book I was reading with the atrocious grammar?  I finally finished it.

I’d picked the book Heroes & Ghosts, specifically because it had 535 pages (nearly twice the number of pages these types of books usually have) so that I’d need to read only one more book—and a short one at that.  After reading the book, I had read a total of 4837 pages.  Which meant I had to read only 163 more pages to finish the challenge. Yay!

Notice the use of the past tense there?  Yeah.  That’s because when I moved around the gameboard (see pic) after rolling the die, I went the wrong way.

I had landed on Deception (sort of like Monopoly’s “Go directly to Jail” card) in the lower righthand corner.  When you land on Deception, you have to subtract 25 pages from the total number of pages you’ve read.  Then, you move backwards with the next roll of the die.  I rolled a 1 and moved ahead, to “Dark.”  I was supposed to move back to “Mafia.

Of course, no one is really monitoring the posts and I could probably definitely get away with the error.  But I’m already fudging the books in one of my other challenges. So I’d like to be as honest as possible here.

It’s doubly sad that I really didn’t like the book.  Actually, I liked the story for the most part, although it did drag on too long. But the amount of bad grammar finally got to me.  I ended up putting the book down for a few days, and when I picked it up again, I wasn’t really that interested in it.  Add to the ubiquitous then/than mistakes (she only used the correct word once in the entire book!), the author then confused slid for slide (and vice versa).  Yes, indeedy.  She confused present and past tense.  Consistently.  Based on some of her other errors, I (and others) think she might have been using a speech to text program.  But that’s no excuse not to edit your work.  (And coming from me, the notoriously bad proof-reader, that’s saying something.)

Fortunately, this is an annual challenge, and I have until the end of the year to finish it—and only two or three more books to go. But man, has this gaff taken the wind out of my sails.  Not to mention another book I’m supposed to read this week was given a 1-star review by a GR mm friend (a Goodreads friend in the male-male romance genre).  She and I usually agree with our likes and dislikes, and her complaints make sense.  So now I’m worried I’ll be reading another book I don’t like.  (Although I have downloaded a sample, and while not prize-winning, the prose is pretty funny.  At least so far.)  I’ll check in later in the week to let you know how it’s going.