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Comment by widowlark | Hacker News Reader

If you somehow have not yet read White Noise, you should put down whatever you are reading and start it now.

It was just ok.

I didn’t really enjoy the absurdist humor. Was the Department of Hitler studies supposed to be a running joke? Not that its offensive, its just not very funny.

Hitler Studies was not the joke; having the major professor of that field unable to speak German, however...

Which mirrors the modern world where people can get degrees in Classics at many institutions working completely from translations and not knowing Latin nor Ancient Greek.

I _liked_ but didn’t _love_ Underworld. Only DeLillo I’ve read so far, but maybe I need to move White Noise up on my list.

I read white noise first by a few years and found it much more enjoyable. I remember a few parts of underworld, and I definitely annotated it a bit, but I don't find it broadly memorable or formative. (Judging by some receipts I left in it, I probably read it in fall 2010. I probably read white noise in 06-07ish?)

That said, I don't give it unqualified recs. It's a good rec if you enjoy other postmodern fiction. It and Catch-22 are my two favorite recs if you haven't read any postmodern fiction but are curious.

If you know you hate postmodern or otherwise self-aware fiction, feel free to skip it.

As an aside: the movie is a surprisingly-faithful rendition, but tbh I was a bit shocked when I read that they were making it.

So much of the book is winking and prodding at pillars of modern US culture through textual absurdities that were hard to translate to the screen. It works surprisingly well, but I'd just read the book.

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