I can only think of one time when I had to do this in order to keep things straight and be able to follow the book, and that book was The Master and Margarita* by Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov. There were so many unfamiliar names (and some characters with the same name, if I recall correctly–this was almost 20 years ago) and such that I kept a notebook with me when I read it to keep track of who was who and what their subplot’s point was, etc.
Obviously I’ve taken notes when reading a book for a class, but this was the only time I ever felt I needed to take notes for a book I read on my own, for pleasure.
Have you ever read a book that you felt you needed a crib sheet for?
*which I really enjoyed, and recommend to anyone. It’s about the Devil.
I sure have. It drives me batty when authors bring in an entire cast of characters, complex family lineage, or 47 different locations within the first few chapters.
Actually, yeah…when I first read the Similarion (I think I was in my teens), I had a lot of trouble keeping all the long ass elven-esque names straight, and following who was doing what.
The Tale of Genji. Didn’t help. I had to go buy another book – The World fo the Shining Prince – and then re-read. One chapter of Genji, check notes, look up all the references in the other, then back to the Genji.
It was interesting and educational, at least. And when done, I went on a binge of reading fluff.
Not within a single book. But there have been times in a series when I’ll need to go back and check some of the previous volumes when a new book comes out in order to remember what the characters had been doing.
Infinite Jest was the book I needed to take notes in order to get through.
Other than that, I often take notes on books I am reading for book club – not to get through them, I would enjoy them just fine without notes – but to keep track of things I want to bring up in the discussion.
“Battle Royale” was like that for me, not only to keep track of the Japanese names, but to keep track of who was getting eliminated. There’s a map at the beginning of the book as well as a list of the students’ names, so I just photocopied both. Helped immensely.
I have an old copy of The Nine Tailors, one of Dorothy Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries. The back cover is full of notes, as I tried to keep track of the characters (-slash-suspects)…
Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude made me want to take notes-- all the characters had the same name (okay, variants of the same).
By the time I figured notes would be a good idea I was feeling stubborn and refused just to spite myself. The repetition was also one of the points of the book.
I didn’t take notes, but I did consult the glossary very often while reading Anathem, and considered looking at the wiki but thought that would be too spoilery. I did manage to get through it without resorting to the terminology substitution version.
Wuthering Heights, and Kate Morton’s The Forgotten Garden. Both had characters with the same name, or characters who were known by different names to different people, and I had to make notes to recall who was related to whom and how.
When I was 12 or so, and making my way through Tolkein’s The Two Towers, I had to make notes to keep track of what characters were where in their journeys.
Lately, in reading* A Song Of Ice and Fire*, I’ve had to flip back and forth to doublecheck stuff a lot, but I haven’t actually had to resort to writing stuff down…yet.
The closest I’ve come was for Cao Xueqin’s Dream of the Red Chamber. Fortunately the Penguin Classics translation had a family tree and “cast list” in the back, which I kept bookmarked, or else I would have had to take notes to remember who all those people were.
I did it once for the exercise when reading 2001: A Space Odyssey and 2010: Odyssey Two back to back in college. I was still planning to be a teacher then, and it just seemed like a good way to prepare to one day teach those books. I still have my marked up copy of 2001.
I should have for Master and Commander. I don’t think I would have understood a word in that book, let alone the plotline, had I not read a summary after the fact at Wikipedia.
