She'd have to write carefully to avoid tearing the paper, but the lipstick would stay "in shape" as it were-I think of all the times we blot our lipstick before returning to the table in restaurants-perfect lip shapes remain on the paper.

At least she was in the bathroom-ever notice how spies, cops, and other characters involved in chases, etc. NEVER need a pit stop? They always stop for food and coffee...but how about the results?

I have tried this (not with loo paper, but on a facial tissue, similar enough), using both lipstick and lipliner. It is incredibly difficult to write one word, leave alone six sentences. The paper tears, lipstick is usually not pointy enough to make distinct letters etc. Only a guy could have come up with that!

In 'Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow', a character has deep scars around both his wrists which are supposed to stem from an overly speedy descent while scuba diving. The author claims that the cuffs of the suit caused the scars because of the rapid compression. As this sounded implausible, I asked a scuba-diving friend, who confirmed that while a fold or wrinkle in the suit can give you a skin pinch, the cuffs do not constrict during ascent or descent.

Oh my - the entire last part of DaVinci Code. Did anyone actually count the number of flights these two made within a 48 hour period, and the number of places they went? They never ate, slept, got jet lag?

Another - Anja the Liar by Thomas Moran is a very powerful book about two couples after WWII who meet in a displaced persons camp. One woman is very insular, wary of everyone and anything, very distant. When her life starts settling down, suddenly she makes this huge jump in character. She starts becoming close friends with her husbands former comrade (a woman, natch) and starts revealing things to her that she never would have before. The switch just astonded me. Once I got passed that, I still enjoyed the book, but still...

I don't expect accuracy in most fiction (I am harder on historic fiction however) But I do want the story to make sense. Sometimes those little things will take me right out of the book.

I hate it when modern terms are used when a work is set in say the 1880's for example. It's quite jarring. I am trying to enjoy Eliz. Hickey's "The Painted Kiss". Here we have the heroine at the turn of the last century talking about the "compartmentalization" of her lover's life....

Years ago I remember noticing that the characters in Crispin's Moving Toy Shop kept going from early morning to late at night with never a pause, dashing between crime scenes. I was exhausted.
A book I started but never finished set in the N Yorkshire fishing town of Whitby, made me very angry. In Victorian times it was a centre for whaling, yet 'our heroine' suddenly got cold feet about the fisherman boyfriend's job, and said she thought whaling would lead to 'over fishing'.
She also indulged in lots of gymnastic sex which seemed unrealistic for those repressed days.

Pity, coz I'd love to read a novel that takes place there (aside from Dracula, of course)...

Speaking of whaling - in Ahabs Wife the author has a 16 year old girl, living isolated with her lighthouse keeper aunt and uncle in the 1800s, decide to go running off with two whalers. The rest of the story was interesting (tho the last part fell apart) but this was so out of place for the date that it kept getting in the way of the book.

This also happened in Queen of Fools. Its the only Gregory book I have liked (tried three), but even this one was iffy. The basic premise was that a Jewish girl in hiding with her bookseller father could be picked by some lord and placed in the court of Queen Mary with no one asking questions. There was also the problem of her rather 20th century ideas about marriage and women's rights. Did women every consider these at different times of history - probably, and they were the seeds to the life we now lead. But I had a hard time believing the 15 year old child would come up with some of her comments in the 1500s.

Cindy, I had exactly the same negative reaction to the P. Gregory books. I tried only one and was really turned off by the modernizations the author gratuitously put in. I've heard this is true of all of the.