By Don Delillo. Anyone read it? Thoughts? I got through the first 60 pages and couldn't put it down but after the first chapter (that's how long it was!), it switched to modern day and I immediate lost interest. (I'm not a 1992 kind of person - aka modern fiction.)
Should I keep going or put it down? How fast does the 800 pages go by? I'm not afraid of a big book but I really don't want to put in the effort of 200 more pages if I'm not going to be interested.
Isn't it odd how one change of scenery can immediately change my taste for the book?
So far (after the first chapter) it's about the day "the shot heard round the world" and Russia tested an atomic bomb happened. But then it skips to modern day, I think.
I read about it in the NYTimes. It was some article about the top 25 books of the last 50 years (or something). I can't remember the details but it was #2. I'd read #1 (Beloved), so I figured I'd start on that list.
Early this year, the Book Review's editor, Sam Tanenhaus, sent out a short letter to a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages, asking them to please identify "the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years." [Read A. O. Scott's essay. See a list of the judges.] Following are the results.
THE WINNER:
Beloved - Toni Morrison (1987)
THE RUNNERS-UP:
Underworld - Don Delillo (1997)
Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy (1985)
Rabbit Angstrom: The Four Novels - John Updike (1995) Rabbit at Rest (1990) Rabbit Is Rich (1981) Rabbit Redux (1971) Rabbit, Run (1960)
American Pastoral - Philip Roth (1997)
THE FOLLOWING BOOKS ALSO RECEIVED MULTIPLE VOTES:
A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole (1980)