Writing this puts me at the risk of exposing myself to some members in a book circle, but I must rant.
Currently I'm reading Maja Lunde's book "Binas Historia" (title translates to "history of the bees", I don't think the book is translated to English). The only reason I'm reading it is to participate in a book circle, and while it's overall quite good I would have stopped reading it before the first chapter was over if it wasn't for the book circle.
Apparently, together with bees, ladders have also gone extinct by the year 2098. One of the characters has to hand pollinate the flowers of fruit trees (many chapters later revealed to be pears), and the description goes to great lengths describing what a gruelling job it is for her, and how bad we should feel for the workers who have to… climb the fruit trees to manually pollinate them? Climbing up and standing on branches? To reach the flowers? All this while the fruit trees are so valuable that the character is terrified of breaking the branches?
The thing is, I've grown up with fruit trees. I've spent a lot of weekends helping my dad prune fruit trees and pick fruit. Standing on the branches is absolutely asinine because we have ladders. You don't even have to lean them against the tree, you can use the A-shaped ones that can stand on their own to reach far out branches!
Meanwhile I'm not sure if this author has ever even seen a full-sized fruit tree. I want to know what kind of trees she's envisioning when she's writing the pollination scenes. Into what shapes have those trees been pruned?? Just to accommodate this lack of ladders???
It's such a small detail but I can't get over it. Everything else in the book so far has been quite fine, and very realistic, but just as I had almost gotten over the tree climbing in the first chapter, a later chapter casually reveals that they also climb the trees to pick the fruit.
Now I really want to know what the author was thinking.
Even if all ladders have gone extinct together with the bees, even if for whatever reason you can't surround the tree with fruit harvesting nets, you still don't need to climb trees to pick fruit! We've got fruit pickers for that! It's a long stick with a bag at the end. Raise the stick until the fruit is in the bag. Wiggle it just a little. Ripe fruit will fall of the branch and into the bag. You get a crick in the neck doing it too long but! You don't need to climb the tree! At all! It's a very simple tool, you can make it yourself with items foraged from your local junk yard!
Also, I know that the author knows that ladders exist, because other parts of the book take place in 2007 and during one of those chapters one the characters use a ladder to remove a lightbulb.
So, apparently, at some point between 2007 and 2098 ladders go extinct. Possibly more extinct than the bees – people still think about bees. Ladders have seemingly just vanished from their reality and the character at no point wistfully think "people used to have ladders for this".
…
Anyway, that was an awful lot of words to say that I'm going completely insane and tearing my hair over a detail that so far isn't even remotely plot relevant, it's an objectively insignificant line presumably only added to make a character more pitiful and yet I can't get past it. Anyone out there got any advice for how to compartmentalise really annoying little details so they're less frustrating to read?
by Asparala