Contenders for the greatest books of all time

That cover is way better than mine

Holy shit. Them quotes! I'm getting a copy right now.

"Burn in hell, California."

what did he mean by this?

I don't want to sound bitter, but holy shit, I am confused about the reception of this book. I had to give up a bit less than halfway through because of how awfully written it was.

The part that really got me was:

>"There's nothing on network," he said to us. "Not a word, not a picture. On the Glassboro channel we rate fifty-two words by actual count. No film footage, no live report. Does this kind of thing happen so often that nobody cares anymore? Don't those people know what we've been through? We were scared to death. We still are. We left our homes, we drove through blizzards, we saw the cloud. It was a deadly specter, right there above us. Is it possible nobody gives substantial coverage to such a thing? Half a minute, twenty seconds? Are they telling us it was insignificant, it was piddling? Are they so callous? Are they so bored by spills and contaminations and wastes? Do they think this is just television? 'There's too much television already--why show more?' Don't they know it's real? Shouldn't the streets be crawling with cameramen and soundmen and reporters? Shouldn't we be yelling out the window at them, 'Leave us alone, we've been through enough, get out of here with your vile instruments of intrusion.' Do they have to have two hundred dead, rare disaster footage, before they come flocking to a given site in their helicopters and network limos? What exactly has to happen before they stick microphones in our faces and hound us to the doorsteps of our homes, camping out on our lawns, creating the usual media circus? Haven't we earned the right to despise their idiot questions? Look at us in this place. We are quarantined. We are like lepers in medieval times. They won't let us out of here. They leave food at the foot of the stairs and tiptoe away to safety. This is the most terrifying time of our lives. Everything we love and have worked for is
under serious threat. But we look around and see no response from the official organs of the media. The
airborne toxic event is a horrifying thing. Our fear is enormous. Even if there hasn't been great loss of life,
don't we deserve some attention for our suffering, our human worry, our terror? Isn't fear news?"
Applause. A sustained burst of shouting and hand-clapping. The speaker slowly turned one more
time, displaying the little TV to his audience."There's nothing on network," he said to us. "Not a word, not a picture. On the Glassboro channel
we rate fifty-two words by actual count. No film footage, no live report. Does this kind of thing happen so
often that nobody cares anymore? Don't those people know what we've been through? We were scared to
death. We still are. We left our homes, we drove through blizzards, we saw the cloud. It was a deadly
specter, right there above us. Is it possible nobody gives substantial coverage to such a thing? Half a
minute, twenty seconds?

(cont. in next post)

>Are they telling us it was insignificant, it was piddling? Are they so callous? Are
they so bored by spills and contaminations and wastes? Do they think this is just television? 'There's too
much television already--why show more?' Don't they know it's real? Shouldn't the streets be crawling with
cameramen and soundmen and reporters? Shouldn't we be yelling out the window at them, 'Leave us
alone, we've been through enough, get out of here with your vile instruments of intrusion.' Do they have to
have two hundred dead, rare disaster footage, before they come flocking to a given site in their helicopters
and network limos? What exactly has to happen before they stick microphones in our faces and hound us
to the doorsteps of our homes, camping out on our lawns, creating the usual media circus? Haven't we
earned the right to despise their idiot questions? Look at us in this place. We are quarantined. We are like
lepers in medieval times. They won't let us out of here. They leave food at the foot of the stairs and tiptoe
away to safety. This is the most terrifying time of our lives. Everything we love and have worked for is
under serious threat. But we look around and see no response from the official organs of the media. The
airborne toxic event is a horrifying thing. Our fear is enormous. Even if there hasn't been great loss of life,
don't we deserve some attention for our suffering, our human worry, our terror? Isn't fear news?"
>Applause. A sustained burst of shouting and hand-clapping. The speaker slowly turned one more
time, displaying the little TV to his audience.

DeLillo, you fucking HACK, don't you know your satire is supposed to at least be somewhat subtle and realistic, and you're not supposed to just beat your reader on the head with it? Reading this part made my face sour and I had to throw it away.

Maybe angstyst book of all time.

is this just a shitty american suburban whine about ennui?

>satire is supposed to at least be somewhat subtle and realistic

I bet you hated Candide and Catch-22 as well

No, It's a quality suburban whine about ennui

The whole "supermarket as a religious experience" was so far off the mark that I just couldn't read further. This guy's an idiot.

DUDE QUIT LIKING THINGS: the book

I'm a bit of a pleb so I haven't read Candide.

I think I was too hasty and you're right, though; what i meant is that the tone should cohere. Catch-22 is consistently zany, starts off zany and stays zany, with moments of equally excessive tragedy.

white noise, on the other hand, is a grotesque failure of tone. It's too realistic (or attempts to be too realistic) for the sudden parts like those to not come off like bad writing. He turns every character into a caricature in an irritating way that I'm fine with when Heller and Pynchon do it, but not him. Or, in short,

Did he repeat the same passage or did you just accidentally copy it twice?

Jk ... I would like to hear your point here clarified though. I'm the person who said I didn't get Delillo here btw: So not a Delillo fanboy being facetious.

What irked you so much about the prose?

>Postmodern

Faust would probably be my first choice

I was only lukewarm on this book after I read it. Then some while later I read dfw's tv essay and when he started analyzing this book I realized how much of it went over my head. I wonder how many of you have the same problem

This is one of those books that, because it's simple, plebs love to hate because they can halfway understand. It's not the best DeLillo, but it's a great (small-g) work.

Moby Dick desku

Honestly, the worst book I've ever read.

Don Delillo is asshurt that people still receive stimuli after 1969.

It's a novel, not an essay.

wat
jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf

I mean White Noise. If it needs analysis to be enjoyed, it fails as a novel. A novel is for story-telling, not point-making.

If you aren't analyzing while you're reading you are a failure of a reader actually

Not that guy, but literary analysis is basically reconstructing a thought process you have while reading (or occasionally re-reading because it relies on knowing how things that happen later relate to things that happen before) a novel. If it "needs analysis to be enjoyed" that means you initially missed connections or themes that someone else pointed out to you. It's like saying that a song "needs analysis to be enjoyed" because it has a confusing counterpoint you miss the first time

Tbqh I analyse after I read then read it again.
The first read is for aesthetics.

Everyone good has already realized that stylistic wizardry is basically superfluous to literary merit. Gaddis restricts it to a few paragraphs a chapter, Delillo avoids it almost entirely, and Wallace does it in this annoying metafictional way involving page borders and odd puns.

You need to analyze my post and realize I'm not advocating against analyzing fiction, mister reader. :)

Nice semantics.

Fiction isn't a refuge for failed academics. If Delillo has something to say about our culture, or technology, let him say it in the appropriate journal.

You guys really fall hard for the bullshit that literary academia churns out along with their workforce entry-permits, huh.

DeLillo isn't that kind of writer though. He has said that he chooses the sound over the meaning of sentences all the time. Seriously, have you read any of his books? It's okay if you haven't

You don't need to read all of a writer's work to tell whether or not he can write.

>If Delillo has something to say about our culture, or technology, let him say it in the appropriate journal.

Nearly every cannoncal writer has written about culture.

Holy fuck you are legitimately retarded.

Wow, and that's why we remember them, right?

Wow. Yeah. Wow.

Wow. Dead Souls
Wow. Great Gatsby
Wow. The Day of the Locust

Wow, they're all books that criticized the cultures of their time, and because it was done well is why we remember them.

Culture doesn't exist in a vacuum, right?

Gatsby is only remembered because of literature teachers, because it's a hamfisted social-critique novel (like WN) and therefore easy to teach. Not because people liked it, i.e. because it was good. It was poorly received.

Those other two books are obscure for good reasons.

Novels are not good because they "have something to say", despite what some hacks and teachers have to say. They're good because people enjoy reading them. I'm shocked I have to say this, but it's Veeky Forums, so whatever, but I'll put it in capitol letters for you, ART IS AN AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE.

Professors and writers abuse the subjective side of aesthetics so they can soapbox and have a job and what have you, but that doesn't mean you have to buy into their bullshit. People did not carry the Greeks and Shakespeare through the ages because of all the wonderful things they had to say about culture or politics.

but nigga, DeLillo IS an aesthetic writer!!

>"You left without saying goodbye. Although that's not why I'm calling. I'm wide awake and need to talk to someone but that's not why I'm calling either. Do you know how strange it is for me to sit here talking to a machine? I feel like a TV set left in an empty room. I'm playing to an empty room. This is a new kind of loneliness of knowing I won't be heard for hours or days. I imagine you're always catching up with messages. Accessing your machine from distant sites. There's a lot of violence in that phrase. 'Accessing your machine.' You need a secret code if I'm not mistaken. You enter your code in Brussels and blow up a building in Madrid. This is the dark wish that the accessing industry caters to. I'm sitting in my cane chair looking out the window. The birds are awake and so am I. Another draggy smoked-out dawn with my throat scorched raw but I've had much worse. I stopped drinking when you left last night. And I'm speaking slowly now because there's no sense of a listener, not even the silences a listener creates, a dozen different kinds, dense and expectant and bored and angry, and I feel a little awkward, making a speech to an absent friend. I hope we're friends. But that's not why I'm calling. I keep seeing my book wandering through the halls. There the thing is, creeping feebly, if you can imagine a naked humped creature with filed-down genitals, only worse, because its head bulges at the top and there's a gargoylish tongue jutting at a corner of the mouth and truly terrible feet. It tries to cling to me, touch and fasten. A cretin, a distort. Water-bloated, slobbering, incontinent. I'm speaking slowly to get it right. It's my book after all, so I'm responsible for getting it right. The loneliness of voices stored on tape. By the time you listen to this, I'll no longer remember what I said. I'll be an old message by then, buried under many new messages. The machine makes everything a message, which narrows the range of discourse and destroys the poetry of nobody home.

>Home is a failed idea. People are no longer home r not home. They're either picking up or not picking up. The truth is I don't feel awkward. It's probably easier to talk to you this way. But that's not why I'm calling. I'm calling to describe the sunrise. A pale runny light spreading across the hills. There's a partial cloud cover, which makes the light seem to hug the land, quiet light, soft, calm, pale, a landglow more than a light from the sky. I thought you'd want to know these things. I thought this is a woman who wants to know these things more than other things that other people might attempt to tell her. The cloud bank is long and slate'gray and altogether fine. There really isn't any more to say about it. The window is open so I can feel the air. I'm not deeply hung over and so the air does not rebuke me. The air is fine. It's precisely what it is. I'm sitting in my old cane chair with my feet up on a bench and my back to the typewriter. The birds are fine. I can hear them in the trees nearby and out in the fields, crows in clusters in the fields. The air is sharp and cold and fine and smells altogether as air should smell early on a spring morning when a man is talking to a machine. I thought these are the things this woman wants to hear about. It tries to cling to me, soft-skinned and moist, to fasten its puckery limpet flesh onto mine."

An exploration of culture and the human experience is very much an evocative, aesthetic experience.

>People did not carry the Greeks and Shakespeare through the ages because of all the wonderful things they had to say about culture or politics.

Modern Democracy is directly based on the Grecian ideas of politics.

You are legitimately retarded.

Delilo has a beautiful short story called 'Midnight in Dostoyevski', y'all should check out. Its free to read.

Also hated white noise and nominate pic related.

agreed but supposedly White Noise is making fun of New York literati and academia around the time of publication

Really? Because I see it as being part of the same establishment.

>An exploration of culture and the human experience is very much an evocative, aesthetic experience.

lol, 4/10, I laughed but didn't get mad

Also can we all talk about how we see middle-brow pseuds saying "very much" everywhere? Holy shit... as if "very" wasn't enough of a useless emphasis word, they're gonna double down on it now.

you have a very shallow understanding of what aesthetics is

and projecting your own insecurities about being middle-brow pseud is very much a good way to out yourself as an insufferable cunt

Where does white noise talk about gender identity?

Oh, you're being serious...

Yeah, I'm probably middle-brow, but pseud, no. I'm just a guy who likes to read and has little patience for bullshit. The literary world is the #1 place for finding not-so-smart people out to present themselves as being brilliant. It makes sense; you can't bullshit your way through STEM disciplines. And I find these types uniformly love industry darlings like DeLillo and Wallace.

So, go ahead, help us understand aesthetics better. What makes White Noise such a worthy aesthetic experience for you?

I think he's using that as a contemporary example of how some of us try to use a scientific basis to explain things that have no scientific basis. Ours is the gender bullshit (Nat Geo [once credible] titled an issue "The Science of Gender"); I forget the example in White Noise, it's been too long since I've read it.

Too bad that's a play.

one of the dumbest posts I've ever read on this board

White Noise is so painfully dated. I'm sure in the 80s it was funnier, but no, I cannot stand this book, its so lame.

I guess you don't understand the function of fiction. If your're looking for entertainment, read genre garbage.

The reason fiction is a great venue to express ideas and cultural critiques because it puts everything into a narrative, which is a familiar and natural habitat. Journalistic and essay writing don't achieve this because they're pure rhetoric and hand-holding. Fiction puts the situation (as I've said) into a narrative so that we, as readers, realize it in example.

/thread

Do pseuds just catalogue search for delillo threads?

>Dead Souls
>obscure
are you retarded?

>quality
The guy is a hack

>If you need to X a Y to enjoy it, it's not good
>But user, X is something you have to do to experience Y at even a fundamental level
>Nice semantics bucko, but you won't catch me in your labyrinth of sophistry

So in your opinion, user, the function of this form of art (art doesn't have a 'function', btw) is to persuade the reader using... what, anecdotes and personal feelings?

I'll take facts and peer-review, thanks. You're describing a parable, btw, which is much lower on the maturity scale than genre titles.

You have to read some of it though

Labyrinths by Borges
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Wilde
All Quiet on the Western Front by Remarque

imo

I didn't really like it desu
Underworld was better but both seem a bit overblown

no where. I was just responding to the guy who said wn was dated. I took the science/fear quote and applied it to contemporary society and claimed that one of the primitive fears delillo is talking about is manifested in conversations about male/female. Issues like these are primitive to me, just as the fear of apocalypse is because they deal with basic, or low hierarchical, features of humanity.

In Search of Lost Time

This

I'll second that

Transparent bait

This book is so funny and the prose is great. Y'all are lame.

White noise is severely underwhelming.

You remind me of when I used to thing Linkin Park was the greatest band of all time

>art doesn't have a 'function'
How plebian could you possibly fucking be?

DeLillo was never much of a prose stylist. If that's the main thing you're looking for you should definitely read someone else.

book is only popular because it has nazis and makes fun of liberals. typical pol trash

this is by far the wrongest thing ever posted here

Only good answer ITT

>If it needs analysis to be enjoyed, it fails as a novel

Well, present academia doesn't disagree. Pitiful state we have come to.

Ratner's Star

DeLillo continuing to bring out the plebs and pol-retards who are confused by his acclaim and his writing. He's literally one of the best English writers, and one of the best alive. A master, dog. I tell you.

absurdly wrong

The Next Million Years

>Here in this hopeless fucking hole we call L.A. The only way to fix it is to flush it all away. Any fucking time. Any fucking day. Learn to swim, I'll see you down in Arizona Bay.

What a fucking cringey hack.

this will never pass as delillo

>a book praised by liberal academia
>for having nazis and making fun of liberals

????

Yeah I think I will pass on DeLillo, no way am I subjecting my self to this dribble.

It's not worth pointing out a single greatest book. No book is that much better than another that it can deemed the best book ever written.

I'd say that he's more readable than Pynchon. Pynchon doesn't write well.

its lyrics from a tool song
holy shit
this is the thread that keeps on giving!

Atlas Shrugged

I would have unironically thought about majoring in Hitler Studies if my college offered it.

I agree, Delillo is definitely a fucking tool.

I agree, Maynard James Keenan is a cringey fucking bastard, who on god's green Earth feels the need to use three fucking names as an artiste

...

youtube.com/watch?v=rMbATaj7Il8

...

DeLillo is great because people who have read his books are clearly not from /pol/