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  • Un-freakin-readable. What happened?

    

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• ― Albion said on May 29, 2007 about the Paperback edition| Add your feedback

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  • I think I'm implementing a 15% rule

  • If I get 15% of the way through a book, and just don't care, or feel like I'm forcing myself to read it, then I can choose to quit it. Now, this is probably kinda cheating with Cosmopolis, since it's only 200 pages anyway, but I don't like this book. The writing is obtuse and self-endearing, the ... Continue

    If I get 15% of the way through a book, and just don't care, or feel like I'm forcing myself to read it, then I can choose to quit it. Now, this is probably kinda cheating with Cosmopolis, since it's only 200 pages anyway, but I don't like this book. The writing is obtuse and self-endearing, the characters are neither likable nor relateable, and the whole thing seems kinda pointless.

    I understand that Don DeLillo is a literary favorite, and already written in stone as one of the great authors of our time. I'm not giving up on him (although I have concerns that all of his books are like this) but I am giving up on Cosmopolis.

    I feel free.

    

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• ― Ty97 said on May 26, 2007 about the Paperback edition| Add your feedback

It is an April day in the year 2000 and an era is about to end -- those booming times of market optimism when the culture boiled with money and corporations seemed more vital and influential than governments.

Eric Packer, a billionaire asset manager at age twenty-eight, emerges from his penthouse triplex and settles into his lavishly customized white stretch limousine. On this day he is a man with two missions: to pursue a cataclysmic bet against the yen and to get a haircut across town.

His journey to the barbershop is a contemporary odyssey, funny and fast-moving. Stalled in traffic by a presidential motorcade, a music idol's funeral and a violent political demonstration, Eric receives a string of visitors -- his experts on security, technology, currency, finance and theory. Sometimes he leaves the car for sexual encounters and sometimes he doesn't have to.

Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo's thirteenth novel, is both intimate and global, a vivid and moving account of a spectacular downfall.

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