Anecdote:
Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy was the topic of discussion in all fashionable drawing rooms when it was released in 1993. Book shops at Khan Market had a tough time meeting demand. Vinod Mehta, giving me his advance copy, said the book had "bored his pants off". 1n https://twitter.com/sandipanthedeb/status/1320635440928419841

I tried to plod through A Suitable Boy on successive nights and fell asleep. It was instacure for my terrible insomina. Vinod and I did something wicked. We got his friend R (who ran a prominent opinion poll agency those days) to do a poll among buyers of A Suitable Boy. 2n

The findings of that poll showed not a single buyer of A Suitable Boy had actually read the book cover to cover, all 1,349 pages of it. Less than 10% (or it may have been 5%) had reached page 50. Yet everybody raved about it.
@sandipanthedeb 's piece revived this fun memory. 3n