Fw: 5 Daunting Doorstoppers You've Just Gotta Have!

[Mark Kohut]

There are LOTS MORE Doorstoppers which fall from bookstore shelves to
the floor around the door with nary a copy bought, much less read.

Maybe it has something to do with quality and anticipation of that quality
(known as buzz or marketing?)....

The Golden Notebook was a huge seller, depending on how one defines 'bestseller". See this 1991 book saying it had sold over 900, 000 hardcovers and over a half-million mass market paperbacks by 1991! http://books.google.com/books?id=3CO5C7fZPYAC&pg=PA55&lpg=PA55&dq=%22golden+Notebook%22+%2B+sales&source=web&ots=ekYCiMXmo0&sig=9EAixDPWUs2EMzEcD_dBwB1JXQk&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=2&ct=result
It was widely and favorably reviewed--see Irving Howe, tough reader, for example...and it has sold and sold steadily in paperback throughout its
life...It has been important to many women of Second Wave feminism--as well as many men.

Of course.

--- On Fri, 11/14/08, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
> Subject: 5 Daunting Doorstoppers You've Just Gotta Have!
> To: "P-List" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Date: Friday, November 14, 2008, 9:59 AM
> 5 Daunting Doorstoppers You've Just Gotta Have!
> 
> I know any lover of books will understand when I say that
> there are
> masterpieces you buy to read and masterpieces you buy to
> shelve. You
> intend to read that Don Quixote or War and Peace or Ulysses
> some day
> -- you believe that its presence on your bookshelf alone
> makes you a
> little smarter -- but somehow you never get around to
> cracking the
> covers.
> 
> That's understandable enough. And forgivable. But how
> is it that the
> contemporary equivalents of these massive, literary novels
> sell so
> well that they climb onto bestseller lists? That people you
> can't
> imagine having the time to read a challenging work, much
> less a
> bhemoth of 898 pages, are suddenly chatting about it freely
> over
> dinnertables?
> 
> Here are five books I suspect have more owners than
> readers. That's
> not a crime! Not even a bad thing! Let's call it the
> fat-book-you've-gotta-have phenomenon.
> 
> 1.The Golden Notebook, by Doris Lessing. The slimmest of
> the lot,
> numbering a mere 668 pages, it's the story of a Anna
> Wulf, a communist
> writer living in postwar London and struggling with
> writer's block.
> Written in 1962, it quickly became a feminist manifesto,
> the kind of
> book you clutched to your chest in protest marches. But it
> seemed more
> talked about than truly read, although I'd argue
> it's the 2007 Nobel
> laureate's best work.
> 
> 2. The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco. I was an editor at
> Harcourt
> Brace Jovanovich in the 1980s when this book was published,
> and even
> we (the happy publishers!) were astounded by the book's
> success. It
> was not an easy novel. In fact, it was downright erudite.
> The author
> was a linguistics professor in Rome! And it weighed in at
> more than
> 700 pages. Yet the book was flying off bookstore shelves,
> making us
> rich, defying gravity.
> 
> 3. Gravity's Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon. Speaking of
> gravity, there's
> this: an 800-page epic as sprawling as it is significant to
> the
> contemporary American canon. It won the National Book Award
> when it
> was published in 1973. But it's a daunting work about a
> daunting
> subject -- the impact of technology on the human animal.
> Have all its
> admirers read it all the way through? I hope so, but
> suspect not.
> 
> 4. Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace. A great,
> wondrous carnival
> of a novel. But at 1,104 pages, a certain calculus goes
> into play: In
> the same space of time it would take me to finish it, a
> cagey reader
> thinks, I could consume four or five other volumes! You
> could beg,
> hector and cajole, but it would take an enormous act of
> will and
> devotion to make that person sit down and give it the
> attention it
> deserves.
> 
> 5. 2666, by Roberto Bolaño. Okay. I'll admit that,
> despite its 898
> pages, I'm going to read every word of this big, fat
> book. I've read
> everything Bolaño has published. And though this last,
> posthumous
> novel has only recently been released, let me go out on a
> limb and
> predict that it will garner superb reviews, win prizes and
> sell many
> thousands of copies. That's good! All very good. By all
> accounts, it's
> a dazzlingly original novel. But I wonder how many of its
> ardent fans
> will actually read it. (Yes, Virginia, there are fans who
> don't read
> the book they persuasively claim to love.)
> 
> Surely you have other examples.
> 
> http://voices.washingtonpost.com/shortstack/2008/11/five_daunting_doorstoppers_you.html
> 
> Also ...
> 
> "Boom" contains some of the brightest, most
> incisive dialogue heard in
> a long time. Among the gems are Jules' goofy,
> look-on-the-bright-side
> suggestion that during their two- to four-year confinement
> until the
> cosmic dust settles, they can "finish a Thomas Pynchon
> novel."
> 
> http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/nov/14/boom-brings-burst-of-fun/