#17: White Noise by Don DeLillo

I really wanted to like this book. Everything told me I should. It got a positive review from The Strand, it has plenty of pop culture references, the language is quirky, and I could never quite get that Rhett Miller line out of my head that goes “I read it in DeLillo like they’d written it to me.” Sadly, I did not find it as enjoyable as I had hoped. The story never quite grabbed me. DeLillo writes an eerie tale of a family in a college town who suffer from devastating bouts of fear and eventually survive a major chemical spill in the area. The characters are eccentric and sometimes humorous, which I can understand would be appealing to some. The themes are also contemporary, playing with what it is like to be living in the US in a modern era. However, I live in this modern era and even share some characteristics of people in the book, I just simply could not connect to the narrative.