5 Daunting Doorstoppers You've Just Gotta Have!

[David Morris]

My take on this list of 5:

1.  I haven't read The Golden Notebook.  Don't know if I will.

2.  I haven't read The Name of the Rose, but I did read Foucault's
Pendulum, which I thought was over-rated:  a lot of hoo-haw going
nowhere and not captivating.  Not bad, but by no means great.  I'm not
sure Eco is best as a novelist.  I think he's read mostly because he's
a famous "intellect."

3.  GR is a masterpiece, and will withstand the ages.

4.  I could only make it half-way through IJ.  I think David Foster
Wallace's writing is silly, and I don't understand why it is taken so
seriously.  I finished The Broom of the System, and didn't like it
either.

5.  I've ordered 2666, but I find it unforgivable that this reviewer
includes it in this list, not having read it himself.

David Morris

On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 8:59 AM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:
> 5 Daunting Doorstoppers You've Just Gotta Have!
>
> 1.The Golden Notebook, by Doris Lessing.
>
> 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/
>
>