Fiction books with footnotes

I love fiction books that have playful, funny, unnecessary footnotes.

I'm a huge fan already of David Foster Wallace and Terry Prachett, and loved Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.

Does anybody have any other recommendations?

Does anybody else share my love?

Have you read The Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud? He makes great use of comical footnotes. The first book is excellent, second is fair, and the third is the best of the three, in my opinion.

I'm a big fan of jonathan strange & mr norrell too, I recently bought / listened to the audio version and thought the footnotes would ruin it, making it too confusing ... but not at all, they still worked brilliantly adding to the story.

have you read any Jasper Fforde stories? his thursday next series, the last two books in it especially, make great use of the footnotes, often with two stories going on at the same time over a couple of pages (it's not as confusing as it sounds, he manages to somehow cram twice as many jokes into the same page).

(those touchstones just will not work for me today!!)

I share you love of footnotes, but I am an academic at heart. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is particularly good in its use of footnotes.

For pretty hilarious footnotes, check out Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman!

The Dracula Dossier is a good one also. Written as entries from Bram Stoker's diaries before he wrote Dracula, with many references to what appears later in famous novel.

IIRC, The Mezzanine has lots of footnotes.

Ibid is written entirely in footnotes!

The footnotes in Ex Libris cracked me up. Actually, they only appeared in the Plagiarism chapter, but that's part of what made it so funny.

You must read The Athenian Murders, by José Carlos Somoza. Without giving too much away, I can tell you that a second story is told in the footnotes, the story of the person who is translating the main story. Or is it a different story? Fantastic book!

Mark Dunn, author of the wondrous Ella Minnow Pea, also wrote a book entirely in footnotes, Ibid, which I thought was much less successful.

Somebody should mention Nabokov's Pale Fire, I suppose - that's probably the most famous use of footnotes to tell a story.

ETA: On the other hand, it doesn't meet your definition of "playful, funny, unnecessary footnotes" - the footnotes may be playful and funny, but they are an essential part of the novel in this case.

A really silly kid's novel called I, Jack is written in first person by a totally clueless golden retriever. The footnotes are written by the cats, to add what they consider a voice of intelligence to the story. The story is really funny, and the footnotes are a hoot.

Anybody read stuff by the late Jack Vance? He's where I first encountered playfully droll footnotes in fiction. His two-volume The Demon Princes set is a good example.

Another scifi/fantasy novel with amusing, whimsical footnotes is The Luck of Madonna 13 by E. T. Ellison which has recently been released in a new Kindle & paperback edition.

Tom Angleberger uses footnotes in his books for adolescents. His Origami Yoda series consist of case notes by a variety of student characters who bicker back and forth. I've mostly listened to his books, so Horton Halfpott my also have footnotes. My notes say 'intrusive narrator.'

Return to the Willows by Jacqueline Kelly is a delightful sequel to The Wind in the Willows and also has snidely hilarious narrator footnotes.

THANKS for reviving this thread. Great list!

I'm reading The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanigihara and it has boatloads. They are included by a fictional editor who is appending the main narrative written by another fictional character.

The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox also features them prominently. I think they were expository, used by the author to clarify obscure bits of info in the main manuscript which he "found" and published by with these notations.

House of Leaves and Book, although the former's footnotes aren't necessarily playful. The latter's are tongue in cheek but organic to the story.

No one's mentioned Infinite Jest?

The op did reference david foster wallace.

Bartleby & Co. is one we missed first time around - a novel written as a set of footnotes to an invisible text, playing around with the concept of books that never got written.

Ship of Theseus, which is the "real" book in the S slipcover by Doug Dorst and JJ Abrams, has footnotes and hand-written annotations that hide a faux mystery.

An Abundance of Katherines uses footnotes in that quirky, funny way, mostly about mathematical equations as I recall.

The Hermit of Sixty Ninth Street comes to mind. The author had been accused of plagiarism and in this book tried to demonstrate the absurdity of footnoting every possible reference to a previous work.

The grandfather of all novels with "playful, funny, unnecessary footnotes" is surely The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne.

I'm just reading Weiberroman: historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe by Matthias Politycki ("historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe" is actually part of the title of the novel as originally published). Sadly not available in English yet, but it's an entertaining dialogue between a narrator and an editor who might or might not be different people, where the footnotes contradict just about all the facts in the text.

The Dissertation by R. M. Koster is a very funny novel that makes great use of narrative footnotes. It's the second entry in Koster's Tinieblas trilogy, and I haven't read the first and third books, so I don't know if they use footnotes as well.

>26 rocketjk: Good to meet another R. M. Koster fan, we very few. His Carmichael's Dog has no footnotes, but is always worth another read.

You would probably enjoy the Izzy Spellman mysteries by Lisa Lutz.

Confessions of a pagan nun

The footnotes are translation of Gaelic and Latin in the text.

The ancestor to the above are the footnotes in a set of very funny biographies called "The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody" by Will Cuppy. The marvelous reference:"the Egyptian Word for "south" was "upstream". Footnote:"it was the wrong word!" still cracks me up after 55 years!

Has anyone here read Shamrock Tea by Ciaran Carson? Each chapter was about a different color used in art and history.

>1 lokar13:
The Gates, The Infernals and The Creeps by John Connolly contain footnotes that are playful and very funny. Some are scientific. These 'Samuel Johnson (and his dog, Boswell) vs. The Devil' books are great fun. For myself, they might be enhanced by the contrast to his Charlie Parker series.

There's not a lot of footnotes but I've encountered them in Barney's Version. The novel is a fictional memoir, the footnotes by a fictional editor that add a bit of realism to the format - correcting names, dates mentioned, etc. It's a good device.

Ananios of Kleitor, though the extensive footnotes are an integral part of the story. Very, very funny though.

On the other hand, I dimly remember reading a couple of novels where footnotes were unnecessary and unfunny and annoyingly intrusive (I think one might have been The French Lieutenant's Woman and the other From the Terrace by O'Hara.)