"I just noticed that a few of my snarkier posts have vanished."
Too bad. You had me rolling in the aisle.
*grins*
My first discovery of the Pothead phenomenon was in the summer of 2000. I was in the Borders Books & Music in Westwood (CA) late one night because I picked up Peggy Noonan's "The Case Against Hillary" which had just come out. I thought I'd scan a few pages and put it down. Before I knew it, it was 10 minutes to midnight. Even though I was 2/3 finished with the book, I decided to buy it. Suddenly it occurred to me that the store was strangely crowded for such a late hour. Then an announcement was made that the store was staying open through the night so that people could buy the new Harry Potter book on the stroke of midnight when it finally hits the shelves. The checkout line zigzagged throughout the entire store. I started to wonder, Is there a book that I would stand in line at midnight to get? And it's not as though the author were there signing copies. I could see myself waiting in line to get an autographed copy of a book by a favorite author (though most of my favorite authors are dead).
This is when I realized that we were dealing with a phenomenon here. The author has obviously taped into the Zeitgeist in some way. But that does not assure me of the books' overall literary value. In late Victorian and turn of the century England, the most popular novelist (the Stephen King of the day) was Maria Correlli. What's that? You never heard of her? Precisely. Her work lost cultural significance after the Great War. Whereas better writers, like E.M. Forster, were able to bridge the period before and after that great calamity, she was not.
So we shall see how these books stand under the unforgiving weight of the years.