Right now I'm reading Hopscotch and it's kinda pissing me off. Having looked into it more closely it seems that there are ninety something chapters, the first 56 or so you can read in the order they're written and they will give you a complete story. And you can stop there. Or you can read all the chapters in a kind of bizarre order he suggests in the front which jumps around through the same story but loads of detail by including the extra hundred or so chapters that you won't touch if you simply use method one. Or I think that you can read them in your own order if you like.
Thing is, it feels that, to get the most out of the book you should read it by method one and then method two and then possibly your own method as well. And i just can't see myself doing that. It's taken me ages to get a hundred pages in and that is partly because, although there is some good writing in there, you can sort of see that he's built it up out of unrelated segments with each chapter carefully avoiding referring to events in previous chapters in any but the most general terms, so that the chapter could be uprooted and placed elsewhere. It makes it a difficult read.
Some of it is good and I'm continually impressed by the level of learning and reading of all the main characters - often happens with literature written around that time, especially South American, at one point I really believed that everyone in Argentina or whatever was constantly travelling around with huge baskets of experimental literature and arguing about them with each other on the train or bus - but at the same time some of the attitudes are startling old-fashioned, which seems really jarring in such a Modern book.
