Next time we're reading The Trees
Let's laugh until we cry
Our April book club pick is The Trees by Percival Everett about a satirical myster about an investigation of brutal murders that resemble the lynching’s from the USA’s dark past.
Here are the important details:
We are meeting on Wednesday the 2nd of April at 20:00.
The book club is at Opzoomerstraat 12C, Studio Tideland
The book club is Bring Your Own Booze, so bring a drink or two for yourself.
Want to join? Email me at boredtodeathbookclub@gmail.com to reserve your seat. I will email you back with a confirmation.
The book club is free, but donations are welcome to help cover the location costs. You can buy me a coffee or use a tikkie. Everyone who has donated, thanks so much! It’s greatly appreciated.
What to read next if you enjoyed White Noise
If you want more weird and complicated work from DeLillo, then try Underworld, a novel about paranoia, american culture and the Cold War. A lot of common recommendations for people who like DeLillo’s work are the books of Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and Cormac McCarthy, which are often just as hard -if not harder - to read. I’d like to add Alexandra Kleeman’s work to this, whose books are just as weird, but much more readable. Something New Under the Sun is set in Hollywood under the constant threat of droughts and wildfires with a splash of corporate corruption from a mysterious organisation that created a brand of synthetic water. During the book club, we also mentioned some non-fiction, like The Art of Losing Control, about a philosophical search for ecstatic experiences and Amusing Ourselves to Death about the corrosive effects of modern media. I also really wanted to find another book fully set in a Supermarket, but all I could find was a book I certainly didn’t love, so if you know a good recommendation for that, let me know!
White Noise Recap
This was very much a love it or hate it kind of book. Plenty of us had a hard time getting through the story, getting stuck on the nothingness of the plot, the strange dialog and poking fun of academic life. White Noise doesn’t make itself very lovable, especially in the first 100 pages or so. For some people the book was unsalvagable, but for others, it really opened up at part 2, The Airborne Toxic Event. Here the book turned strange and a little silly, constantly going for anticlimactic outcomes even when the plot was doing something big. We enjoyed arguing about whether or not Hitler studies was funny and meaningful and if teenagers really talk like that and had plenty of laughs about all the silly tidbits in this book. Of course we also spoke about the fear of death at length, while chugging some homemade Dylar tablets. And while we kept coming back to the title of the book, the use of advertisements in dialog, the constant jabbering about unimportant things and how this was a very deliberate choice, the White Noise was just too noisy for some of us.
If you have any other recommendations for White Noise or for our book club in general, feel free to leave them in the comments!