He’s a writer of ideas and concepts, he likes to explore the boundaries of language he’s interested in motivation and influence, the swell of mass-thought and how it can be manipulated and stretched. If you’ve read any DeLillo then you’ll probably know that plot is not his primary driver or something that features that heavily in his books. It was, however, a rewarding reading experience. None of this aids in the reduction of my backlog at all. It’s a long time since I read Libra, one of his most respected books, and it felt like it was perhaps time to give it a refresher. Of course I would not read White Noise itself, that would be too obvious, and I consciously avoided my favourites – The Names and Mao II – and instead plumped for his sprawling, dynamic byopic of Lee Harvey Oswald, alleged assassin of John F Kennedy.

What prompted this desire for DeLillo is the release of the movie of White Noise, which I’m a bit wary of, which precipitated this article by John Self (whose Twitter feed is one of the few I still furtively read, not being a Twitter user anymore, or not officially anyway) which was enough to tip me nicely over the edge. I have read almost everything by DeLillo (my only omissions are: Ratner’s Star which I thought I would love but have struggled to get past the first 50 pages, and Amazons written under a pseudonym, a novel which DeLillo prefers not to own up to) and there are a core of books which I will happily read and re-read over and over. When “history” presents itself in the form of two disgruntled CIA operatives who decide that an unsuccessful attempt on the life of the president will galvanize the nation against communism, the scales are irrevocably tipped.A gripping, masterful blend of fact and fiction, alive with meticulously portrayed characters both real and created, Libra is a grave, haunting, and brilliant examination of an event that has become an indelible part of the American psyche.Since I decided that I wasn’t going to buy any books for a year, my motivation to read from the backlog has fizzled out and instead I felt a kind of crazed urge to re-read something by DeLillo. Kennedy, Don DeLillo chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald’s odyssey from troubled teenager to a man of precarious stability who imagines himself an agent of history. In this powerful, eerily convincing fictional speculation on the assassination of John F. Synopsis: From the author of White Noise (winner of the National Book Award) and Zero K

Libra delillo