I agree with the OP: they are a distraction from the main text. They make the book look snazzier, and perhaps make it better suited for browsing or for reference, but at the cost of detracting from the readability. I never know how or when I’m “supposed” to read those sidebars (and this includes substantive captions on illustrations). If I read them when I come to them, I have to break off in the middle of the main text (where there’s often not a good stopping place) and then later come back and remember where I left off and pick up the thread again. But reading through the main text first before going back and reading the sidebars, which is what I usually do, is somehow unsatisfying and distracting too.
Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Delany’s Dhalgren are examples of novels that have parallel texts running side by side on the page. The previously mentioned House of Leaves is an example of simultaneous texts that are not just parallel but perpendicular, skew, and/or exisitng in alternate dimensions…
Same here. I can’t think of any novels that have done it either.
My father was in management, and had a lot of managerial training books and booklets lying around the house. I used to read them. A lot of them had case studies in sidebars, I guess to show how the theories were supposed to work in real life. These books would have been published before the 80s, and most before the 70s, I think.
It really irritates me when the footnotes go on and on, for a few pages ahead of the text, when it doesn’t really contribute to the novel.
I recently read Paul Erdman’s The Swiss Account, and he drove me crazy. Yes, I knew it was based on efforts to stop the Nazi atom bomb project, but I didn’t need to spend five minutes reading a three page footnote about how that one sentence was taken from Allen Dulles’ personal journals, or that for a more in-depth account of Swiss neutrality in WWII I should start on page 188 of Edgar Bonjour’s Geschichte der Schweizerishen Neutralität, Vol. V (Basel, 1970). Really, “based on true events” is just fine.
I’m sorry to see “enjoyment” and “learn[ing] something” presented as alternatives. And is “narrative” consigned to only one side of that divide as well? Many of my favorite books have all these features (and often footnotes as well). For that matter, there are other kinds of flow (subject to interruption) besides narratives.
In the particular case here I’m quite baffled by the sidebar. I really can’t tell what it’s supposed to be adding to the text.
I have seen sidebars (and/or footnotes) used well. I suppose that they should be set up in such a way that the book “works” both with and without them:
- You can read the main text of the book straight through without any sidebar detours, and everything makes sense. Also the pages are formatted in such a way that this can be done in an “eye path” that is not notably more complicated than reading a book without sidebars.
- You can read the main text and the sidebars, each sidebar as it comes up, and the sidebars inform the main text in some way without taking you too far away from it. It’s always evident how the sidebar “attaches” to the main text.
- You can read only the sidebars, and each one makes some kind of sense all on its own.
Sidebar not a foot note.
Some writers intend that effect - they don’t want you to
I’m not sure it’s something that’s particular to books, though; I think there are a lot of people who feel the same way about movies or even music, and people on the other side who appreciate a little more complexity or weirdness even in the structure of whichever medium it is.
Eutychus mentioned Wallace already, but I would love to know what The wind of my soul thinks about his Host.
Not footnotes that bother me, but the weight of some (Follett, Clancy) of them as one tries to read in bed lying on just a pillow.
D says I need a husband. 
Quasi
To clarify, no, I’m not referring to novels. I’m referring to non-fiction books, although I don’t think I’d term them “reference books.” Reference books makes me think of an encyclopedia, or something that’s clearly not meant to be read straight through. I read non-fiction books that actually have concepts that build upon each other, so that there is value in reading them straight through.
Oh and also, I’m referring to sidebars, not footnotes.
That actually looks like it could be fun, if I was in the proper mood.
Generation X is the first one that comes to my mind.
Or The Athenian Murders.
Fred Pohl’s G**ateway was chock full of sidebars.
Never mind.
Here I thought some poor bastard was trying to read Moby-Dick. My god, when that useless twit goes off on a tangent, he doesn’t stop until he’s written an entire book about knots or waves or whatever. Moby-Dick’s about the only book that is improved by abridgment.
Les Miserables likes to shutdown the story to go off on sidebars too. While you may have the use of the entire seat, when the French get talking about their theories of social organization, you need only the edge! It really helps to set the milieu of the time.
Or Crime and Punishment.
It’s like reading two books and a Russian culture primer and history lesson all at once.
Heh, both HG Wells and Verne have whole sections (Verne is worse, but I blame that on his being 19th century) where your average reader just skips to the end of the technical explanation. They were hell-bent on showing how the apparently-unrealistic technical parts or exotic geography were actually real. I do appreciate that they took the effort to do it, but damn does that cause some seriously huge walls of text.
I guess we should be thankful they didn’t include the equations.
The absolute winner for lengthy footnotes has to be Sir Richard Burton. It’s most pronounced in his epic translation of The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night, but it’s in his other works, too. The space taken up by the footnote is frequently greater than the “plain text” on the page. Considering that the footnote is in much smaller type, that means that the footnote can be an awful lot longer than the original text. But Burton fills his footnotes with such weird and fascinating information, ephemera, and asides that it’s hard to fault him for them.
Better than sominex. I don’t think I have ever made it past about 25 pages before drifting off. Took me forever to read it in school.
Getting back to the O.P., no it doesn’t bother me in the least.