"Evelyn Waugh owned a translation of Tolstoy’s novel Resurrection for which someone had composed 'a particularly felicitous index. The first entry is: "Adultery, 13, 53, 68, 70"; the last is "Why do people punish? 358." Between them occur such items as: Cannibalism, Dogs, Good breeding, Justification of one’s position, Seduction, Smoking, Spies, and Vegetarianism.'"
From "Futility Closet: An Idler's Miscellany of Compendious Amusements" by Greg Ross.
I invite you to write an index for a famous novel. Radically incomplete and thoroughly random entries are encouraged.
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the appendixes of The Lord of The Rings are my most favorite parts; including (of Course!) the indexes (plural, one for people, one for things, one for places)
Bonfire of the Vanities.
Pimp roll, 23, 45, 234.
I have NO IDEA what (or how many) page numbers there'd be (I don't even know the name of this book)
Bootlegging
Daisy
East Egg
Golf
Parties
Stock Market
West Egg
WWI
Life on the Mississippi
N word, 1, 3, 4, 35....
Does Kindle's search function count? If so, all kindle books are indexed.
If you have a text version of the book indexing is simple. Just drop it into Word and it will generate an index automatically
John Henry
A good index is an invaluable tool. Creating a good index seems like cruel and unusual punishment for any non-autistic person.
"Yes, why don’t more novels have indexes? They’d be fun to read on their own."
How about a few pictures, huh, for the kids out there who don't like to read?
John henry said...If you have a text version of the book indexing is simple. Just drop it into Word and it will generate an index automatically
I've never tried it, is it any good?
Key word searches can be hit and miss. And then there is the largest book found in everyone's house: Strongs Concordance. It can also be used as a weighters lifters tool.
@tim maguire, I vaguely recall using it a bunch of years ago. IIRC, it indexes every word, so you have to (had to) go back through the index and delete entries for words like “and,” “a,” “the,” “but,” etc. That may have been fixed by now.
How about a few pictures, huh, for the kids out there who don't like to read?
Asking for a friend? The index of such a volume of pictures might consist of little pictures of the page the picture is on so the kids could avoid numbers at the same time they avoid reading.
Tim,
I've not used it much but did experiment with. It indexes every occurrence of every word on every page.
Yo then need to edit it to take out words like the and of. It might do that automatically. It's been a few years since I tried it.
Also, I think you need to do it after formatting and pagination is locked down. I don't know if it will auto update page numbers like it does chapter's.
John Henry
Nabokov's "Pale Fire" has an index.
Index or Commentary? Indexes work in the realm of what is explicitly stated. Commentaries can branch out into themes and metaphors and other unstated topics.
Imagine an index or concordance of Ulysses by James Joyce. It would probably be pretty dull, containing little insight. But there are many commentaries on the work.
Indexes are works of art in and of themselves. The best indexes are in cookbooks.
The log jam on publishing the Dead Sea Scrolls was broken when an outside scholar obtained a bootleg copy of the research team's concordance, and turned it over to a computer programmer who was able to reconstruct the text.
Thanks John and Mike. Sounds like a good system if you're searching for appearances of someone's name. Not so good if you want appearances of an idea--which usually requires more than 1 word, and might not always be the same word.
Still, a big help in compiling a first draft.
Machine generated indexes suck. You need a human to draw inferences that a machine can't see, and evaluate what is or isn't important.
Some indexers still use index cards.
Adenoid
Banana
Candy
Dog
Entropy
Flebótomo, Cesar
Gretel
Herero
IG Farben
Judaism
Kenosha
Lübeck
Masonry
NAAFI
Oneirine
Pig Hero
Qlippoth
Runcible Spoon
Schwarzkommando
Tannhäuser
UFA
V2 (see A4)
Waite, Arthur Edward
Ypres
Zero
Almost all my books have a few pages of index written in the vacant pages in the front and the back, so I can find stuff. In page order, not alphabetical. But it's stuff I thought worth noting in case I want to find it again.
I think the index needs to leave the book to be unnamed. I’ll start with an easy one.
- Light
- The making and shaping of land masses
- Origin is species
- Snakes
- Apples
- Large boats
- Floods
- Locusts
- Food Safety and Handling
- Disease Prevention
- Slavery
- Murder
- Statutory Law
- Salt Sculptures
- Female leaders
- Haircuts
- Primitive weapons and trumpets in warfare
- Expansion of the Roman Empire
- Metaphysical Rape
- Gifting
- Emergency midwifing
- Taxation
- Censuses
- Elevated Orations
- Parables
- Whores
- Team Dynamics
- Silver Currency
- Near Death Experiences
- Numerical Patterns
- Women named Mary
- When the Man comes around
- Leonard Cohen songs
Fifty Shades of Grey:
Beat me...
Fuck me...
Make me write bad checks....
libertariansafetyguy ...
that seems like an index to more than 5 books
For Agatha Christie:
[Spoiler Alert!]
And Then There Were None
Judge - revealed as murderer, p. 179
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Narrator - revealed as murderer, p. 212
Murder on the Orient Express
Passengers - revealed as murderers, p. 195
Curtain
Poirot - revealed as murderer, p. 183
To add to Gilbar's fine list:
Green Light
THEOLDMAN
The classic is a permuted title index, amounting just to every (non-stoplisted) word in its one-line context printed out and alphabetized by that centered word.
Gilbar, there are many books within this book.
"I have NO IDEA what (or how many) page numbers there'd be (I don't even know the name of this book)."
Maybe I'll write an Evelyn Waugh inspired index to "The Great Gatsby." It seems worth doing! With Kindle locations....
"A good index is an invaluable tool. Creating a good index seems like cruel and unusual punishment for any non-autistic person."
Yeah, but the exit from that problem is not to write a good index. Write the index that fits your (presumably non-autistic) mind.
It would be boring to have "Daisy" as an entry in The Great Gatsby index, interesting to have... oh, say... bouncing light.
It's similar to tags on a blog.
"Nabokov's "Pale Fire" has an index."
Thanks!
Gravity's rainbow? Herero was the tip
Clevinger
Peckem
Dreedle
Halfoat
Game of Thrones.
Rape
See: Attempted Rape, Child Rape, Married Rape, Male Rape, Torture Rape, Murder and Rape, Gang Rape, Every day Rape.
"I think the index needs to leave the book to be unnamed. I’ll start with an easy one."
Yes, this is a really fun game (if you use a gettable book).
Googling will probably produce the answer.
I wish I had written more in the books I've read, like when I read it and what I thought of it.
I did create an index to "Getting Things Done," so I can refresh my memory of what I'm supposed to do when.
Arthur Conan Doyle apparently annotated the books he read, and encouraged his children to do the same. Considering the two brothers lived as wastrels off the family fortune, it didn't help.
I would like to see someone try to index The Brothers Karamazov.
Garvity's Rainbow from Ficta, then the Bible from lsg. Catch-22, too easy narciso!
An index is more than just a list of words, which is a wordlist. Very useful things, wordlists.
Narr
Crown Jewels
Hiding Place
Stained Glass
(already mentioned)
@Bill Peschel,
Serious question: Did/does "Getting Things Done" work for you? I read it years ago, and was very inspired by it. I went through a period of cleaning house, organizing my files, etc. But eventually it fell by the wayside. I think I made it too complicated. I've often thought of reading it again and giving his system another chance. Since you indexed the book, I'd love to hear your insights.
J G Ballard took the Pale Fire idea one step farther with a short story that's just an index. I liked it.
libertariansafetyguy said... Gilbar, there are many books within this book.
plenty of songs too!
Drought
Eustace
Slide
Jupiter
House of Leaves has an index (I'm almost certain) and definitely has tons of footnotes, some of which reference real works/sources and some of which reference fictional titles.
Hyperlinked concordances would be fantastic for "serious" lit novels--trace all allusions, that sort of thing. I guess Genius kinda does that with lyrics.
Althouse -
Have you read Pale Fire? The "index" is a key component of the novel itself.
@sdaly
No. I haven’t read much Nabokov. Only Lolita and a book of essays.
There’s tons of stuff I haven’t read, and I read all the time!
Prof, I wince when people tell me or others "I feel sorry for you!" when a gap or aversion is mentioned. Pale Fire is probably my favorite, but Pnin might be a good starter--VN was often accused of being hard-hearted, but his favorite playthings never are--mostly they feel and perceive too much (but sometimes they don't perceive reality very well at all . . .)
He was also accused of being apolitical and a rightwinger (often at the same time), both of which are blown from the arses of his self-proclaimed enemies. Pnin, Glory, or Invitation to a Beheading put paid there.
I could, but won't go on about the memoir, and Lo . . .
Narr
Lo, standing four feet ten in one sock
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