I was very much looking forward to reading this one, and in some superficial ways this book is a lot like some of my favorite stuff. But wow what an instant slog. Sorry Donny but life's too short.

The strangest and probably most original book I've read by DeLillo so far. Not nearly as incomprehensible as it's made out to be.

The novel revolves around the deciphering of a code sent from a distant star, and subsequently the creation of a mathematical language to send a message back. More thematically it revolves around humanity's use of math and science to better understand the universe and, in turn, come to terms with mortality and purpose.

What the novel succeeds in answering is that while math and science can lead to breakthroughs, it will never ward off our primal fears. It will, in fact, make the unknowable more terrifying. As we see in the last scene where (light spoilers) any unpredictable event like an unplanned eclipse will simply send us crawling back into the Earth's "reproductive dust."

For me, this novel is the full experience; challenging, hilarious, intellectually puzzling, thought-provoking, suspenseful and compelling. Though the more-pointed parts of the mathematical jokes are over my mathless head, the punchline is impossible to miss.

Having harbored a girly crush on Don Delillo's mind since my first reading of "Underworld", with the reading of this book I would say I am beyond smitten. The intellectual hilarity is, as noted in many a review, somewhat Pynchon-esque (I am only now reading those) yet uniquely Delillo-y.

I've not yet finished it as I am doing so in a sort of circular motion -- somewhat like the flip side of experiencing a Gertrude Stein, who is so delightfully Gertrude Stein-ish, in a manner so very Gertrude Stein-ly --- re-reading sentences on average of three times till I am sure I get the joke and the point, despite my lack of mathematical prowess.

The plot(s) is/are reminiscent of the word problems in university math classes yet with oddball characters throughout each scenario and an inherent punchline in every sentence. I was adequate at math yet excelled at word problems so perhaps this explains the appeal for a subject matter I'd not have chosen. I think Delillo would make an amazing and hilarious math professor, actually. I would like to keep his mind in a wired canister and absorb the sensory readings through some sort of osmosis.

I read this without first reading any summaries or reviews, yet having read 3 other Delillo works -- "White Noise", "Underworld" (twice, a few years apart), and "Libra" (also twice; upon reading the last word I immediately turned to page one and began again) yet was fully unprepared for Ratner's Star. At first it seemed a departure, though I now know it preceded the other works I'd read and that makes more sense to me. I will absolutely read all the other Delillos.

This read reminds me in part of that old 60s madcap movie with myriad questionable characters on a scavenger hunt, and so in my mind I call this, "It's A Math, Math, Math, Math World", though It's also a bit, "Sleeper" (Woody Allen's finest work, IMHO), and "Star Wars" (the bar scene), all within the rings of a circus. I almost want to never finish it, though I am becoming curiouser and curiouser about the final punchline of all punchlines.

18OCT16. Beware, there's not much about the book here. Just a long-overdue rumination about my own reading.
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I really, really want to like this book, and when I sit down with it I enjoy it—lots of new tech terms to look up (1989 pub. date notwithstanding)—but it seems whenever there's a choice between doing almost anything else (playing a chess game, checking email, watching a DVR'd TV show, working out...) and sitting down to read, I nearly always pick the former. Which is terrible, since curling up with a book is an activity which, for many years, I used to do at the expense not only of activities like those mentioned, but of life imperatives like eating regular meals, getting to work on time, going to bed at a decent hour, etc.

And by terrible I mean it's been a legitimate crisis of the conscience since I first noticed it happening in about 2013 or so. I honestly don't know what brought this malaise/apathy about, and I've seen other formerly high-wattage readers mention it online with the same befuddlement I'm conveying here, but I suspect it has to do with all the heavy-duty reading I/we do on a daily basis on laptops and phones.

I've been intending to write about this for a couple years now, and have gone so far as to sit down with the intent of posting something online at least four or five times. For some reason here and now is where and when I'm confessing my sins! :-)

More to come, perhaps....
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31MAY17. Deleting the Twitter app from my phone appears to have helped, at least in part. (It was not easy to do. Reading/Surfing Twitter—I rarely posted—was the closest thing to an uncontrollable addiction I've ever had.)