Doorstoppers: Books that provide physical exercise along with a mental workout (IANS Column: Bookends)

Certain news portals may have a small blurb next to an article headline that tells the reader the time it will take them to read it usually five minutes or less. The feature, which can be found on some online editing tools too, seems a rather telling indictment of our contemporary time-stressed, hyper-regimented life, but it is unclear why it's confined to reading only.

Supposing this trend gets transplanted to books as well? Will it work on what are known, in the literary realm, as "doorstoppers", or works so thick and heavy, say over 500 to 1,000 pages or more, that they can be used as the eponymous article.

For such books, the reading time will need to be measured in weeks, or months, and for the casual, not very committed, readers, it could stretch to a year.

While many comprehensive and leading dictionaries, encyclopaedias, and textbooks, from various realms of sciences to law to computer languages, are doorstoppers, the category is still common in fiction. These must be differentiated from omnibus editions in which two or three "medium-sized" works of an author, or even more than one author, are printed together.

Doorstoppers in fiction usually comprise what we call literary classics, say George Eliot's "Middlemarch"

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