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House of Leaves moment
If you like footnotes, you’d love House of Leaves.
It’s got footnotes, it’s got two-page long foot notes, it’s got footnotes within footnotes!
No way, that’s on my to read list for completely unrelated reasons already
It’s really good, but be prepared for a wild reading experience. You have to get it in print in their new(ish) full color format. Because the medium of the content is as important to the experience as the content itself.
And it’s loooong
Structurally, the most challenging book I’ve ever read was “The Message of THE QUR ĀN” by Muhammad Asad.
Start with the fact that the QUR ĀN itself is extremely non-linear. So much so that I think that this alone requires a great deal of study to address.
The text is 2 columns, the original Arabic adjacent to his English translation. There are copious and often long footnotes. The footnotes cross reference other footnotes, sometimes in chains. I read only the English.
I had to read it 4 times. Once just ignoring footnotes. Again, this time including just first-level footnotes. Again, following footnote chains back to their sources in the text. Finally, to reread just the text after pretending that I had everything figured out.
It took me a year to get through it to my satisfaction, although it was not the only reading, or even major project.
Reminds me of reading the print version of Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, where you needed one bookmark for the novel and another for the endnotes, which made up like 20% of the book. Hopefully e-readers make that easier now.
Depends on the reader I suppose. But in my expirances, its much much worse. You see, in a book you can quickly flip back and forth between pages. Moving bookmarks takes no effort. On a ereader you have to pick your page via a menu, go go your book marks via different menu. Delete bookmark via menu
Menu menu menu click click click its awful.
Got a book with a map at the front? Well you better memorize it because its not worth the effort to flip back and forth when ever some location comes up.
It’s my experience that they’re depicted as somewhat awkward hyperlinks in the book to the (howeverthefuck thevpublisher formatted them) footnotes and back.
