Mentions
I loved the first Don DeLillo book I read (“White Noise”, now a movie), but then I read “Ratner’s Star” which I loathed so much than I never read another DeLillo book again. This was probably an over-reaction, so … anyone have DeLillo recommendations for a reader who hated RS?
“Enjoy these aimless days while we can, I told myself, fearing some kind of deft acceleration.” White Noise won the National Book Award two years after I was born, but it felt like it could’ve been written yesterday. (Delillo was obviously inspired by Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death, a book I read this winter.) I avoided it for years because it seemed like an MFA lit-bro favorite, but it turned out to be my favorite thing I read this spring. Two takeaways from that: 1) you can’t necessarily judge art based on its fans 2) The classics, even contemporary classics, are so much weirder and deeper than you even suspect!