In the grand tradition of bloggers reviewing books, I just finished "Consider the Lobster" by David Foster Wallace and wanted to share my impressions.
The essays are thought-provoking, engaging, funny, compelling. Wallace could write about dryer lint and make it interesting. But he has this thing for footnotes, as shown below:
Note the footnote to the footnote. After a few weeks of reading essays where a good part of the page was in this tiny type, I wound up with eye strain that hurt so much I actually had to go to the eye doctor to make sure it wasn't a brain tumor. I found it hard to believe that mere footnotes could do that to me, but the pain went away when I finished the book.
I understand Wallace's need to footnote, because in this hypertext generation it's hard to write linearly when you want to link to different concepts and digressions. But there's a reason most fiction and non-fiction books aren't typeset like the Yellow Pages. The footnotes are part of Wallace's distinct style, but after a while it's not fun anymore, it's just unreadable.
In the last essay of the book it appears that maybe he's understood this and tried a different approach:
OK. That gets the type size up, and sort-of keeps the offshoot close to the main text so I'm not jumping way down to the bottom of the page to read it, but still. Please. Come on. David Foster Wallace, your text looks exciting and different, it's a great trick, but ultimately it's too hard on your readers. For our sake: Consider the parentheses.