What is up with all the typos I'm seeing in books these days? Does no one proofread these things before they go to press? I'm not a grammarian, but three books lately have contained errors so egregious that they interrupted my reading! Babyville by Jane Green and Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult both contained an instance where the wrong character name was used. In each case, a pronoun was used for one character in a two-character scene and where the name of the other character should have been, the character referenced by the pronoun was named. For example, "She told Julia that her plan was...." in which "She" referred to Julia and the other character's name should have been in place of Julia in that sentence. And American Spy by E. Howard Hunt proved my mother right on the subject of spell-check. When spell-check first came out, my mother dismissed it as worthless because it could only tell whether or not a word was spelled correctly, not whether or not it was the right word for the sentence. In American Spy, some folks are described as "making due" and later he refers to the "power behind the thrown". Two words that wouldn't be caught by spell check because they are spelled correctly, but are the homonyms for the words he actually means, "do" and "throne", respectively. Witnessing this sorry state of American publishing makes me sad, for my mother should never be proved right about anything.