I remember cheating on Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. If you've never read the book, it's spent in double and triple flashbacks: "To understand where I am now, I must tell you about that night in the observatory. // There I was, cowering in a telescope, and I thought back on all that had come before, especially the job as an editor that I used to have. // While I worked as a publisher I remembered how I first met Jacopo Belbo...". I suppose we would describe it as a stack data structure, you keep pushing a new "present" onto the end of the existing one.

So here's how I cheated. At one point the main character suddenly takes a trip off to Brazil, and I thought, "man, this is getting ridiculous. I bet if I just skip ahead to whenever he comes back from Brazil, I won't have missed much." It turns out that while I had missed some important things, like a new girlfriend who becomes a major player in the story, I saw enough of them afterwards to conjecture about what had happened in Brazil.

What's more interesting to me is the set of books that I keep returning to. I have probably read Zelazny's Great Book of Amber (which is itself 10 novels) five or six times in my life, maybe more. It just captures me and takes me on a ride, each time.