#Friday56 & #BookBeginnings: Zero K

For Book Beginnings:
Everybody wants to own the end of the world.

- p. 3 (ARC, page may change)

For Friday 56:

The room in the long empty hall. The chair, the bed, the bare walls, the low ceiling. Sitting in the room and then wandering the halls I could myself lapsing into my smallest self, all the vainglorious ideas around me shrunk into personal reverie because what am I in this place but someone in need of self-defense.

- p. 56 (ARC, page may change)

Synopsis of Zero K by Don DeLillo: Jeffrey Lockhart's father, Ross, is a billionaire in his sixties, with a younger wife, Artis Martineau, whose health is failing. Ross is the primary investor in a remote and secret compound where death is exquisitely controlled and bodies are preserved until a future time when biomedical advances and new technologies can return them to a life of transcendent promise. Jeff joins Ross and Artis at the compound to say "an uncertain farewell" to her as she surrenders her body. "We are born without choosing to be. Should we have to die in the same manner? Isn't it a human glory to refuse to accept a certain fate?" These are the questions that haunt the novel and its memorable characters, and it is Ross Lockhart, most particularly, who feels a deep need to enter another dimension and awake to a new world. For his son, this is indefensible. Jeff, the book's narrator, is committed to living, to experiencing "the mingled astonishments of our time, here, on earth." Don DeLillo's seductive, spectacularly observed and brilliant new novel weighs the darkness of the world-terrorism, floods, fires, famine, plague-against the beauty and humanity of everyday life; love, awe, "the intimate touch of earth and sun."

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Just came in the mail for me for review consideration. I've never read any of DeLillo's work so can yo blame me that I'm a little intimidated? Have you read anything by DeLillo?