5 Daunting Doorstoppers You've Just Gotta Have!

[tbeshear]

I'd add DeLillo's Underworld and Vollmann's Europe Central and Fathers and 
Crows to the doorstop list.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dave Monroe" <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
To: "P-List" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Friday, November 14, 2008 9:59 AM
Subject: 5 Daunting Doorstoppers You've Just Gotta Have!


>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/
>