Libra - Don DeLillo
This fictional take on the events leading up to the assassination of JFK is a gem. DeLillo has this great way of talking about the technical or philosophical, and then letting the prose slip into the mind of a character (sometimes for a single sentence, sometimes for a few paragraphs). These human parts of his writing, the times where he delves into a character’s psyche, are astonishing. They encompass the all-too-relatable qualities of human thought, biases, and basal fears, and give me this feeling of simultaneous empathy and disturbance. In the end DeLillo makes it clear that a conspiracy is simply an outside explanation of an enigma, and even though there was a major conspiracy that can be seen as instigating much of the cascading events, the ultimate double assassination in Dallas came down to coincidence, chance, miscommuncation, and disorganization.
Highly recommended book.
