I’ve mentioned before that one difference between book form and digital is the growing sense of loss–even as so much is gained in the reading of a good book–as the visual end draws near; the last quarter inch diminishing with each page read. I don’t know that I’d been aware of the joy of the inch yet to read, the bulk of a story unfolding that holds such promise of interest and adventure as the marker slices into a spot so near the beginning. Forty pages into 100 Years I am involved in the narrative and there is great pleasure in seeing how much more is available to be read, just by the bookmark sticking out from the slim box form of the book. It is like an assurance that a certain measure of time is promised to me to spend in the storyworld of the Buendia family.
In considering new media and hypertext fiction, where the end is not seen, not known, I wonder at the sudden halt that comes with the resolution, when all paths have been traveled and the story is done. Suddenly, without warning, it is over. But a book shows the visible journey of story, uses guideposts and relative signs: "I’m halfway through; I’m almost finished."
I suppose too, that watching a drama on television, or sitting in a movie theater, applies this principle as well. A two-hour movie on tv can tell us where we are in the story, how close we are to finding out who-done-it, with a glance at the clock.
Does storyspace then, the physical placement of reader and book, reader and laptop and screen, watching a movie, affect the reading?
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
I enjoyed “100 Years of Solitude,” but I kept mixing up who was who because all the names were the same.
And I remember having the same problem with Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov decades ago–only because of what seemed like similar names, plus characters were addressed by pet names I believe. Someday soon I’ll go back to this–I was more than halfway through it at the time.