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Comment by na85 | Hacker News Reader

>if a book has an index it's non-fiction.

I've read an awful lot of novels and not a single one has had an index.

Lord Of The Rings has one.

I believe the thinking is that it's the need for that as an ontological divide, rather than "it's telling a story about a thing that didn't happen". The divide being "heuristics about things it has" rather than "critical analysis of what it is".

The Lord of the Rings has an index. Only one I can think of.

Robert Jordan's "The Wheel of Time" books.

House of Leaves is another. It also has footnotes.

> footnotes

Footnotes. I hadn't thought about footnotes. The winner here has to be Jonathon Strange and Mr Norrell, some of whose footnotes are micro stories thrown in as a bonus for attentive readers.

Although Jonathon Strange and Mr Norrell doesn't have an index.

Yes, exactly the point. It feels as if education has dropped to the point where poor heuristics are commonly deployed in lieu of comprehension.

Man I was just thinking about this last night. I recall an assignent in middle school where I had to write a poem with a simile in it (among ither literary devices) I lost points because there was no simile. When I went to the teacher and told her "there is a simile : 'the cat fell in much the same way as a boulder' " (or something to that effect)

I was told similes have to have the word 'like' or 'as' in them. Which is just not true but has become such a common hueristic that even English teachers think its the definition of a simile. sigh

I totally did that on purposes though cause I wanted to see if she would dock me a point for that. I was such a little prick.

Being a prick to clueless teachers was a perverse joy of mine in my K–12 years. I enjoyed coming up with the most galaxy-brained solutions to assignments.

Same. However I went too far. A philosophy teacher left the class room, and refused to continue teaching my class, after I politely started arguing against her reasoning and showing counter examples. They had to find another teacher to take over the class.

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