Ok, so this monstrosity has been sitting on my shelf for almost a year. 1,000 pages: is it worth it?

I liked White Noise a good deal, but it wasn't as daunting of a read. Also, I see a lot of postmodern lit. types championing this book and frankly, that's not really my thing.

Hopefully Mr. BER will chime in here. He has yet to steer me wrong.

CRAP

or

NOT CRAP?

I'll happily share the cost of this C/NC since I too loved White Noise and I too am loathe to invest in The Big Book if it's CRAP.

I started reading this and never finished it.

I won't go so far as to say it's crap cause there's several very good books I've started not finished then returned to later and thoroughly enjoyed. However, I took a good chunk out of it and it's still sat on my shelf but I must admit I haven't had any compulsion to give it another go.

I'm aware that that is of no real help but there you go.

Earwicker wrote:I started reading this and never finished it.

Same here.... I got it just before our daughter was born... over four years later the luxury of having the time to read such a massive book is still far away on the horizon.... I really envy those Victorian guys who could just sit around reading in top hats all their life.

It's been a while, too long to really remember what it was I hated in this book, but I hated it.

Maybe it was Delillo's overly "cinematic" approach. You know, "X walked over to kitchen, got a milk carton from the fridge and put it to his lips." I hate that kind of redundant non-writing.

It was also quite obviously conceived as some sort of a magnus opus, which also annoyed me.

CRAP

The prologue was excellent, but it kind of fizzled out for me not long after that. I'll revisit it someday.

is as good as it gets- basically his short story Pafko at the Wall repackaged.
I remember having my interest peaking and waning during the rest of the book. The formibable setpiece at the start of a 800 page novel sets almost too high of a standard for what follows and I may not have been up to the task of giving this work the attention it deserved.
When I am unemployed I may reread the book- but its definitely worth the effort of a first read.

Not crap, mostly because the prologue is simply amazing. Everything that comes after it is fine enough, although I can't remember much of it clearly after the prologue.

It's certainly better that White Noise, the second most overrated "postmodern" novel after Time's Arrow.

I give it a NOT CRAP, because it does have one of the finest prologues in modern American literature.

But the WF is off the fucking charts, because if a book is just too goddamn dense and longwinded to make a pleasant reading experience, can you really call it "good"?

I have another Underworld-ish monster sitting on my shelf that I have yet to tackle - A Winter's Tale by Mark Helperin. What say you? Or should I start a new C/NC so as not to hijack this one? (Honesty, I'm betting only a handful of people have read Underworld, so it's not like another book would be taking up valuable real estate in the thread.)

Ty Webb wrote:I have another Underworld-ish monster sitting on my shelf that I have yet to tackle - A Winter's Tale by Mark Helperin. What say you? Or should I start a new C/NC so as not to hijack this one? (Honesty, I'm betting only a handful of people have read Underworld, so it's not like another book would be taking up valuable real estate in the thread.)

While I have not read A Winter's Tale, any interest I had vanished when I read his recent collection of stories. Some were ok, but mostly very lame.