I did for Anna Karenina. There would have been too many names and nicknames to keep track of otherwise.
War and Peace, +1 for Anna Karenina. Any time I encounter the 75 names by which the average Russian character can be called out I have to write them down. I was about a third of the way through War and Peace before I learned this, and it was really a much different book after the “pedigree collapse” which then occurred in my brain.
Also The Silmarillion, which I still don’t think I’ve ever managed to get all the way through. Or maybe I did that last time, but was just as befuddled at the end as at the middle. . .
You’re reading A Song of Ice and Fire too, huh? Martin does all three! In between his mouthwatering, pages-long descriptions of their feasts, that is.
In all honesty I haven’t had to resort to notes with it yet (about 1/5 of the way through the third book,) but I’m damn close…
The problem is, Martin will have a paragraph where he lists off a ton of characters that are off commanding forces, or lords of such and such castle, and I have no idea if those will be like most of the other people casually mentioned and either not mentioned again, or maybe once or twice in passing, or if they will end up coming back and being important, and I’m supposed to remember that he was defeated in battle by someone else two months ago.
Still a great series, though. But at least in my versions, anyway, there are family trees in the back…though that’s hard to access quickly on a Kindle…or, it is for me, because while I’m sure there’s some sort of easy to use bookmarking system, I don’t use it.
When I first read Watchmen I made a crib sheet to keep track of all the characters hero-name / alias / generation / their fates.
Clicked into this thread to post a reply about Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita…then realized that was what the OP was about. 
I agree that it takes either notes or a lot of back-flipping for a non-Russian speaker to get through that one, especially in multiple sittings. It’s not just the unfamiliar names and the different characters with similar names, but also that each character has several names to go by – first, last, nickname, professional nom-de-plume – and you can find them interchanged within the same paragraph.
All the same, it’s one of my favorite books. It’s a wonderfully absorbing masterpiece that you can sink into as easily as slipping underwater, witty and thought-provoking, with a wickedly black sense of humor. Tickles the imagination in all the right places. Highly, highly, highly recommended.
I agree that it is a great book. I should read it again one of these days. I was only 19 or so when I read it the first time. I would probably understand it a lot better now, though I’m sure I’d still keep a notebook for all the names.
This book is very helpful, and also interesting in its own right.
Most books by Faukner, I try to draw out a little family tree or connections. I don’t really come back to him, though, so it was truly just a way of keeping everything reasonably straight. War and Peace or Proust – I found enough other things to interest me than worrying about little details like minor characters. The supposedly baroque James tends to stick to the impressionistic points of view of a few characters, so he’s out. Big epics like Orlando Furioso or Homer (indeed all of Greek mythology, whether transmitted through Ovid’s epic or smaller sources) tend to take well to mapping out “little graphs,” to free the mind to work on the verse.
I have not, but probably should have a few times. I’d also like to add that one of the best features of the kindle is to search by keyword. More than once I’ve thought ‘who was that again?’ and was quickly find the answer.
No, but having The Key to The Name of the Rose was very helpful.