My book club's $35 splurge on a fancy edition backfired hard

We pooled money to buy a special annotated version of a classic novel. Turns out the footnotes were so long and boring nobody could get through a chapter. Three people dropped out halfway through the month. I'm still sitting on that book, and nobody wants to trade for it.

2 comments

2 Comments

king.derek1mo ago

Skip em. Seriously, just skip the footnotes entirely until you finish the chapter. I had the same problem with a fancy Frankenstein edition where every footnote was some random literary critic rambling. Read the book straight through first, then go back and check the footnotes if you really want. It made the story actually readable for us.

jenny_coleman1mo ago

Did your book club try skipping the footnotes? We had a similar disaster with a "critical edition" of Moby Dick. Those tiny print notes took up half each page and killed the story's flow. Sometimes you just have to read the main text and ignore the rest.