The practice of reading
gruelling works of literature, such as
War and Peace,
Finnegan's Wake or
The Gulag Archipelago simply to say you've done so. I myself am a recovering
literary masochist; it becomes an addiction. At one point, I'd regularly read a
Dostokevsky or
Tolstoy novel in a single weekend.
This term might also be applied to authors who've written entire novels without using the letter 'e', e.g. "A Void" by Georges Perec, or similar feats.