things kevin hates

I’ve been doing a pretty good amount of reading lately. Mostly nonfiction, in a variety of genres: sports, science, philosophy, politics, and plenty of others. And I’ve come to the conclusion that I absolutely cannot stand endnotes.

Often a writer has things to say that don’t belong in the main text, but still need to be said. Sometimes they’re parenthetical asides; sometimes they’re citations or clarifications. There are two main ways to deal with these: make them either footnotes (placed at the bottom of the page) or endnotes (buried in the back of the book). Now, I don’t mind an endnote if it’s just going to be something along the lines of “ibid p. 347.” But if you’re going to tell me something even remotely interesting, why the hell should I have to flip a couple hundred pages to read it?

One book that takes footnoting to the extreme is Bill Simmons’s The Book of Basketball. Admittedly, it’s not the world’s most scholarly work, but it is incredibly well-researched and stunningly comprehensive. And the footnotes are full of entertaining asides, jokes, and pop culture references that fly over my head. But the nice thing is that the footnotes are there for you to look at, not buried between the acknowledgments and the index.

Contrast that with another book I read recently: Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought, which hasn’t a single footnote. The vast majority of the endnotes are of the dry, scholarly variety, but there are a few gems in there. Unfortunately, the endnotes themselves don’t make sense unless you know their context, so to enjoy the few that contain interesting stuff, you have to hunt down where they occur in the text to see what’s going on.

I realize that authors and publishers don’t want to clutter up books sold to the general public with half a page of footnotes for every page of text, but it’s certainly possible to find a happy medium. I recently read Richard Dawkins’s The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, and though it has its fair share of endnotes, pertinent material is placed as footnotes. It’s a very nice balance.

So please, publishers, put notes where they belong: at the bottom of a page of text if they’re interesting, at the end of the book if they’re citations and crap like that. Simple as that.

P.S. Totally random aside, but I feel like I can’t mention footnotes without mentioning David Foster Wallace’s heavily-footnoted essay on Roger Federer.