/lit/ - Literature

So i picked this book up after feeling like an idiot 200 pages into Infinite Jest.

I really enjoyed it, but i get the sense I didn't 100% understand everything that was going on. It's a good feeling, because it encourages me to read it again.

For you anons who have read it:
What do you make out of the constant interruptions by Tv/Radio stimuli that are featured in the book? Are they merely aesthetic dressing/atmospheric details?

What's the importance of the family structure presented?

I get the sense of irony (not to mention the point being driven) that SIMUVAC uses the emergency to train for the simulation, but outside of the ironic joke, what do you think of the world the book is trying to build by featuring this sort of absurdisms?

I'm hoping other anons' points of views will better inform my second reading.

Is this a hard book for non-Anglos?

Read this, absolutely loved it. Where do I go next with DeLillo (this being my first one)?

This book turned me into the left

I read the first couple of pages of a novel a while a go but in the mean time I forgot its name or the name of the author.

What I can remember:
>fiction, must have been published pretty recently (1990 or later, probably 2000s)
>plot involves some sort of disaster in a major US city (San Francisco I think)
>Might have been nuclear or maybe alien, I think a major point was that the event is never really explained
>The novel revolves around a family (who live elsewhere) who lost a daughter in the event, but no one remembers her or her disappearance except for her brother (or something like that)
>The novel opens on the daughter, studying in SF and working as a babysitter, as the disaster occurs (some sort of blast/flash), she survives but the child she babysits doesn't. She tries to find shelter/help and finds another child (near a bus station?). The two eventually
make it to a refugee camp where they are treated for radiation sickness, but I think its implied that nobody survives
>The first chapter ends there and picks up some time later, following the girls family and her younger brother who is the only one who seems to remember her or something.

That's pretty much all I can remember. Except that it was around the time I read White Noise by Don DeLillo and I might have stumbled across this book looking for similar works.

Reviewers and readers often say that this book is about consumerism, or about the saturation of consumer products, or the saturation of media in your everyday lives.
How does EVERYONE consistently fail to address the fear of death theme, that the fear of death can be medicated, that they’re thinking is so much their it’s not even relevant to from the beginning so it’s so weird seeing something like that and it happens almost like they mean it to they’re reading.

Well that was shit

>>12375906

Wow. What a load of shit.

"It's raining now,"
>podcast subscribing son
>boomer dad who can't get anyone wet even when it's raining

Who's the one with based and redpilled?

What do you think of this book?

This book made me want to read Baudrillard. Is he worth reading? (I was given the impression by a friend that he 'critiques liberalism' in a certain sense)

Low brow midwit trash

>>10877066
I finished this yesterday and fucking hated it. Why do people like this? What's the point?

>>8838108
>>8833625
Step up

A source of spurious profundity is DeLillo's constant allusions to momentous feelings and portents—allusions that are either left hanging in the air or are conveniently cut short by a narrative pretext. Jack ponders the clutter in his house: "Why do these possessions carry such sorrowful weight? There is a darkness attached to them, a foreboding. They make me wary not of personal failure and defeat but of something more general, something large in scope and content." What is this something large in scope and content ? We are never told. Later Jack registers "floating nuances of being" between him and his stepdaughter. Similar phrases turn up throughout DeLillo's novels; they are perhaps the most consistent element of his style. In Underworld (1997) a man's mouth fills with "the foretaste of massive inner shiftings"; another character senses "some essential streak of self"; the air has "the feel of some auspicious design"; and so on. This is the safe, catchall vagueness of astrologists and palm readers. DeLillo also adds rhetorical questions or other disclaimers to throw his meaning out of focus. Here, to return to White Noise, is another of Jack's musings.

>"We edge nearer death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot."

>Is this true? Why did I say it? What does it mean?

The first and third of those questions are easily answered; after all, we edge nearer death every time we do anything. So why, indeed, does Jack say this? Because DeLillo knew it would seem profoundly original to most of his readers. Then he added those questions to keep the critical minority from charging him with banality.

DUDE

POSTMODERNISM

LMAO

Worth reading? Considered literature?

What are lit's favourite modern classics? Not Modern Classics™, but modern classics.