Libra: Don DeLillo

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And when entering the book, you can add tags, notes, set a star rating, or even add it to a group (which I like to do for book series so all the books show up together in the catalog). Adding this data makes your library easily searchable, and you can find books alphabetically by title/author, by published date, by tag, or a variety of other sorting methods. Her frustrating interaction with a State Department aide will resonate with anyone who has faced the impersonality and indifference of government bureaucracy:

Libra is a terrific piece of work. It has a huge cast of characters and a very complex web of events, all handled neatly and elegantly. While DeLillo's characters never really open up to the readers, they can still be haunting and memorable. The writing is very dense and can have a lot of sub-textual meaning. Instead of directly telling the readers what the mood of a scene is or how a character feels, he creates the atmosphere with his words and conveys the feeling quite effectively. Among other things, I liked the way he would give one the sense of slowly or rapidly passing time without saying as much (I have lost my copy, otherwise I could have pulled out a few quotes to show you what I mean. Oh well.) Oswald's mother's neurotic behavior, his wife Marina's feelings of helplessness, dilemmas of many characters are portrayed so well that even minor characters carve a niche for themselves and stay with the reader. I read DeLilllo’s White noise not so long ago, enjoyed its humor and weirdness and I cannot remember a thing from it. On the other hand, this book is plot plot so much plot. Too much plot? Too little anything else? Towards the end of the novel, DeLillo writes (in the guise of the secret CIA historian, Nicholas Branch): Much of the JFK conspiracy-theory detail that has gathered around the assassination over the years, like a grotesque pearl forming within a polluted oyster, has stemmed from one known historical fact – that there were operatives within the CIA and other agencies of the U.S. government who were unhappy that President Kennedy, after the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, refused to consider war with communist Cuba. The Libra 2 is available to buy directly from the Kobo Store online or at major retailers worldwide.Libra received critical acclaim and earned DeLillo the inaugural Irish Times International Fiction Prize, as well as a nomination for the 1988 National Book Award for Fiction. Think of two parallel lines. One is the life of Lee H. Oswald. One is the conspiracy to kill the President. What bridges the space between them? What makes a connection inevitable? There is a third line. It comes out of dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers, out of the deepest levels of the self. It’s not generated by cause and effect like the other two lines. It's a line that cuts across causality, cuts across time. It has no history that we can recognise or understand. But it forces a connection. It puts a man on the path of his Destiny.” Libra was awarded the inaugural Irish Times International Fiction Prize, as well as a nomination for the 1988 National Book Award for Fiction. [13] [4]

We had started off on the wrong foot, but Libra has patched things up. I too share Paul's suspicions about Libra and White Noise having been written by the same person. Had I been handed these two books without the cover, I wouldn't have known those words had flown out of the same figurative pen. Book Crawler is another app for book inventory that many iPhone and iPad users enjoy, so it can be worth investigating. It offers quite a few in-depth and exciting features that may be useful when building your book catalog! To add books to this book catalog app, you can either enter them by searching ISBN numbers and keywords or you can use the barcode scanner to scan your books and have them automatically upload with book thumbnails, summaries, and more. While there are tons of books that will have information automatically associated with them, you do also have the option of manually entering book information if it is a rare or antique book. Even at school, the patsy assassin, Oswald, “wanted subjects and ideas of historic scope, ideas that touched his life, his true life, the whirl of time inside him.”

Specifically, Delillo paints Oswald as a lonely and grotesque fringe dweller who becomes the perfect shill for a plot by current and former CIA operatives to take an errant shot at JFK, with the unsuccessful assassination attempt to be blamed on Cuba. It's arguable that DeLillo's interest in conspiracy or, at least, conspiracy theories/theorists is secondary. It's an extension of his interest in secrecy and mystery (or mysticism), an issue that pervades his earlier novels.