A quibble about notes: could we please put them at the bottom of the page?
Reading more than one book at a time means that it takes me longer to finish a particular book, but I find that that disadvantage, such as it is, is usually outweighed by the insights gained by the sometimes serendipitous and sometimes planned connections between the books that I’m reading. I developed this practice while teaching at a small liberal arts college, when it was common for me to be teaching three or four different courses in a semester.
Two of the books I’m currently reading — Luke Kemp’s Goliath’s Curse and Erik Olin Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias — are rather large and ambitious. I’m only about a third of the way into each of them, but I’m really glad that I’m reading them together. Kemp’s discussion of how states (which he calls Goliaths) are born and then decay overlaps very nicely with Wright’s criticisms of capitalism.
But I’m not here now to write about those ideas. I’ll do that later. I’m here to vent. Reading these two books together reminds me — as if I needed to be reminded! — of the value of having notes at the bottom of a text’s pages instead of collected at the back. Wright’s book does it the way it should be done — notes at the bottom of the page. Kemp’s book has me constantly flipping between the page that I’m reading and a page near the back of the book. It’s frustrating, especially when I judge that I really don’t need to read a particular note.
A small thing, I know. But I wonder how much more time it takes to read Kemp’s book simply because I have to keep bouncing back and forth.
And don’t get me started on the fact that so many books these days are published without an index!
