What was the best book you read this year?

The couple books I probably enjoyed most were Don Winslow's Savages and Kings of Cool. They were fun reads. I also enjoyed Don DeLillo's White Noise and a few of Norman Mailer's early novels (Barbary Shore, The Deer Park and An American Dream). On the non-fiction side, no question that Caro's latest Johnson book, The Passage of Power, topped my list.

 

Could you try to sell me on White Noise? I started it once and put it down within 100 pages. I feel like I missed something.

 

To me, White Noise is terrible through the entire smog scare.Like the portion that DeLillo had to hack through to get where he actually wanted to go. It picks up in Part III and my favorite part is Babette's father visiting. Still, I read Underworld and Libra before White Noise and enjoyed the first two much more. Underworld is about as good as a novel can be.