Thursday, September 22, 2005

Top 20 Books, #20

I will be spending some time over the next couple of months counting down my top 20 books of all time. I was just going to list them, but thought this would be more fun.
Here's numero 20, which actually garnered a recent mention in BillyBlog.




First of all, the cover is amazingly frightening, especially since this book came out pre-9/11.

Secondly, I can understand if, at 832 pages, people aren't going to want to read this. However, if you do ANYTHING with this book, you must read the prologue, which has been universally praised as an opening tour de force of little equal. So good is the prologue, which describes the final game in the Giants-Dodgers series in 1951 and Bobby Thompson's "shot heard 'round the world," that it was re-published as Pafko at the Wall: A Novella.

The ball that Bobby Thompson hits is painstakingly tailed by DeLillo into the modern age, as we are treated to a host of characters that are all intertwined by the fabric of 1990s American culture.

One can read fuller editorial reviews of Underworld at amazon.com:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/product-description/0684848155/ref=dp_proddesc_0/002-9019149-2754422?%5Fencoding=UTF8&n=283155

Have a great weekend!

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