Jose wrote:
> Nonetheless, as a reader I have a problem with
numerous secondary
> characters. Last week I abandoned a novel on page
200 because it had so
> many I had to keep going back every couple of
pages.
A few years ago, I read a hardbacked copy of "Into Thin Air"
(hardboiled at times) the true story of two teams of climbers
trying to reach the summit of Everest. Besides the leaders of
the two expeditions and the 1st person narrator, there are
about fifteen characters of similar importance and weight,
all introduced in the first thirty pages. It was impossible
to keep them all straight except that on the back cover was a
group picture of them all. Every time I got lost or confused
as to who was who, I would look at the photo to get back to
speed again. (After the first hundred pages, this was no
longer necessary since they all became quite singular in
their own way.) It was a harrowing, fantatstic book, but I'm
not sure I would have gotten through it without that
picture.
Brad
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