Introduction

Offbeat is a blog about the fantasy genre, featuring news and commentary on books, comics and writing. Enjoy!

Monday, December 17, 2007

Glossaries

I was browsing Absolute Write, when I noticed a title with something about glossaries in it, and this post came to me. Like magic. Or not really, anyway, Glossaries tend to be pretty popular in fantasy books.

My question is, do you, the reader, enjoy them? Personally, I don't mind them so long as the author doesn't rely on them. That means, I don't want to read a passage that says something like, "And the beautiful heroine stepped on the Zog and left" and then have to go look up in the back of the book what a Zog is, because the author doesn't explain it in the actual story. That's annoying, and it breaks the flow of the book.

However, with really complex stories, I don't mind a glossary I can go back to and check things in, so long as, like I said before, I read it in the book first and then just use the glossary as a reminder later on.

How about everyone else?

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi. I've been thinking about glossaries lately too. Mostly, I hate dialect that I can't understand without having to look up something in the back.