There's a petty font issue I've got with it ...

I hear this. I never did read Wally Lamb's "She's Come Undone" because the eyestrain factor produced by the too-bold, bleeding edged font was just too great. Also, books set in Souvenir automatically lose 20 or so intelligence points AFAI concerned.

I never did read Wally Lamb's "She's Come Undone" because the eyestrain factor produced by the too-bold, bleeding edged font was just too great.

The Picoult book is killing me! She's changing font for different voices, chapter by chapter. I can figure things out pretty well with just a character name at the beginning of the chapter, thanks. Maybe its a picky thing, and it is, but its bugging the crap out of me.

She's changing font for different voices, chapter by chapter.

Oh, dear lord. That would drive me insane.

She's changing font for different voices, chapter by chapter.

Wow, that's...kind of cool. Faulkner originally wanted the voices in the Benjy section of The Sound and the Fury to be in different colors. That would have been expensive, though, I imagine.

I suppose in theory its cool. But in practice, at least in this case, its aggravating. A technique that the author wanted to try but had no real reason to use. (Although she has got a lot of narrators. So far it feels like too many for the story she's telling.) Up until now I've loved her work, but the little things are grating on me in this one, which is a shame, because its a hell of a premise.

I really hate reading anything longer than a few words in italics. It screws up the shapes of the words and makes it take twice as long to read. There have been a whole bunch of books that everyone tells me are great, that I just haven't read because they've got pages on end in italics, and I know I wouldn't be able to read it. (Same thing with sans-serif fonts, to a lesser degree. I can read it, but it just takes a little longer.)

I honestly can hear my own teeth grind at the fancy-font-changing stuff.

What on earth good does it do? How does it advance the story? How does it enrich the characters? How does it do anything at all except distract? If you're doing it to denote a separation at a moment in the story, cool; I use that to separate ghost from thought, because sometimes both voices are in one's character's head. But for every single character?

Dude, just friggin write, already.

The Picoult book is killing me! She's changing font for different voices, chapter by chapter. I can figure things out pretty well with just a character name at the beginning of the chapter, thanks.

Oh, that would drive me batshit. I've come across things like that in fanfic, though not in actual books before. Aside from disrupting the flow, it makes me feel like the author is either a) unable to adequately differentiate the characters through, oh say, the writing, or b) assumes I lack the ability to pick up on those distinctions without some sort of clue. Feh. I'm sure that's not always the intent, but by that point they've pretty much lost me.

She's changing font for different voices, chapter by chapter.

Ugh. Is she insecure? Did Adobe bribe her to showcase their latest version of Garamond? If she can't write well enough for us to know what character is speaking without fancy font stuff, why is she being published?

The layout folks must despise her.

Katherine Blake (aka Dorothy Heydt)'s Interior Life uses different fonts for its main storyline about a 70s Berkeley housewife, the fantastical quest world she is either imagining or psychically linked to, and for [spoiler]. I think it adds a lot to the book, not least allowing her to shift from character/world to character/world mid-sentence, which gives a sense of the worlds interpenetrating and affecting each other while still being understandable.

I'm also fine with different fonts used to indicate letters, newspaper articles, telegrams, etc., especially in "false document" narratives. (I still think the larger category should have a cool name, like "epistolary novel," damnit.)

Aside from that, not so much. And I HATE funky ink colors with a passion. Black is default; I don't notice it; I notice the words. Other colors distract me.