WHY WHY WHY would people use endnotes?
When you read a book, and someone makes a point, and puts a little number next to it, that means there's further information about that point, or a slightly tangential/amusing opinion, or simply the source of the point. Which more often than not, you want to read. So you glance to the bottom of the page, where you find your (hopefully Terry Pratchett-esque) footnote, your curiosity is sated and you move on. But no! For there are those in the world who do not believe life should be this easy, so they put their thinking caps on:
(ACT ONE: SOMEWHERE IN THE BOWELS OF HELL)
'Hey, you know those great footnotes you get in books?'
- 'Yeah?'
'Haven't you ever wished they were more... I don't know... annoying? Harder to find? Time consuming?'
- 'Totally! Someone should totally come up with that!'
'Well. I think I have an idea. Why not put them all in the back of the book?'
- 'So you have to skip to the back every single time you want to read them? And then back again?'
'Yes! Sometimes even twice with ONE WORD!'
- 'It's genius, frankly'
(SCENE)
The book currently causing my rage is, 'Rape: A History From 1860 To The Present' by Joanna Bourke. Now, as you might guess from the title, this is not light reading, so you might think the author/publisher might want to take it a little easy on the reader. But no. The book is nearly 600 pages long, and includes almost 100 PAGES OF ENDNOTES. Any bored mathmos out there who want to calculate how much of my life I am going to waste flipping backwards and forwards, please be my guest.
Ok, I feel better. But it may not be because I'm ranting. It may just be because all the time I've been writing, I have not been holding the book. Back to it...
2 comments:
if I could make a suggestion, albeit as someone who only occasionally reads the odd text book, if it's got that many endnotes then read them AFTER you've read the main text. If it's not "important" or relevant enough information to be included in the main text, then it can wait.
Your only other solution is to rip out all the notes and keep them seperate so that you don't have to keep flipping back n forth. However I could never encourage or condone such an act of vandalism :P
If I'm not mistaken, and this is entirely from an at least 2 year old memory, this book contains a chapter titled something like.."how to lie with endnotes"
It ought to amuse you :)
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