“What are Don DeLillo’s Best Books?” We looked at all of DeLillo’s authored bibliography and ranked them against one another to answer that very question!
We took all of the books written by Don DeLillo and looked at their Goodreads, Amazon, and LibraryThing scores, ranking them against one another to see which books came out on top. The books are ranked in our list below based on which titles have the highest overall score between all 3 review sites in comparison with all of the other books by the same author. The process isn’t super scientific and in reality, most books aren’t “better” than other books as much as they are just different. That being said, we do enjoy seeing where our favorites landed, and if you aren’t familiar with the author at all, the rankings can help you see what books might be best to start with.
The full ranking chart is also included below the countdown on the bottom of the page. We will update the article if/when a new book by Don DeLillo is released. Although it probably won’t be immediate so the scores on each site have time to settle and aren’t overly influenced by the early, usually much more opinionated, users.
Happy Scrolling!
Eric Packer, a billionaire asset manager at age twenty-eight, emerges from his penthouse triplex and settles into his lavishly customized white stretch limousine. On this day he is a man with two missions: to pursue a cataclysmic bet against the yen and to get a haircut across town.
There is September 11 and then there are the days after, and finally the years.” “Falling Man is a novel about the event that defines turn-of-the-century America. It begins in the smoke and ash of the burning towers and tracks the aftermath of this global tremor in the intimate lives of a few people.” “First there is Keith, walking out of the rubble into a life that he’d always imagined belonged to everyone but him. Then Lianne, his estranged wife, memory-haunted, trying to reconcile two versions of the same shadowy man. And their small son Justin, standing at the window, scanning the sky for more planes.” “These are lives choreographed by loss, grief and the enormous force of history.
Pammy and Lyle Wynant are an attractive, modern couple who seem to have it all. Yet behind their “ideal” life is a lingering boredom and quiet desperation: their talk is mostly chatter, their sex life more a matter of obligatory “satisfaction” than pleasure. Then Lyle sees a man killed on the floor of the Stock Exchange and becomes involved with the terrorists responsible; Pammy leaves for Maine with a homosexual couple. And still they remain untouched, “players” indifferent to the violence that surrounds them, and that they have helped to create.
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?”
Lauren Hartke is an artist whose work defies the limits of the body. She is living on a lonely coast, in a rambling rented house, where she encounters a strange, ageless man who has uncanny knowledge of Lauren’s life, and together they begin a journey into the wilderness of time.
Three unusual people–“defense intellectual” Richard Elster, who was involved in the management of the country’s war machine; young documentary filmmaker Jim Finley, who is intent on documenting Elster’s experience; and Elster’s daughter Jessica, who behaves like an “otherworldly” woman from New York–train their binoculars on the desert landscape of California and build an odd, tender intimacy, something like a family. Then a devastating event throws everything into question.…
DeLillo’s Running Dog, originally published in 1978, follows Moll Robbins, a New York city journalist trailing the activities of an influential senator. In the process she is dragged into the black market world of erotica and shady, infatuated men, where a cat-and-mouse chase for an erotic film rumored to “star” Adolph Hitler leads to trickery, maneuvering, and bloodshed. With streamlined prose and a thriller’s narrative pace, Running Dog is a bright star in the modern master’s early career.
One of DeLillo’s first novels, Ratner’s Star follows Billy, the genius adolescent, who is recruited to live in obscurity, underground, as he tries to help a panel of estranged, demented, and yet lovable scientists communicate with beings from outer space. It is a mix of quirky humor, science, mathematical theories, as well as the complex emotional distance and sadness people feel.
At twenty-eight, David Bell is the American dream come true. He has fought his way to the top, surviving office purges and scandals to become a top television executive. David’s world is made up of the images that flicker across America’s screens, the fantasies that enthrall America’s imagination. And then the dream–and the dream-making–become a nightmare. At the height of his success, David sets out to rediscover reality.
From the author of White Noise (winner of the National Book Award) and Zero K Bucky Wunderlick, rock star and budding messiah, has hit a spiritual wall. In mid-tour he bolts fromhis band to hole up in a dingy East Village apartment and separate himself from the paranoid machine that propels the culture he has helped create. As faithful fans await messages, Bucky encounters every sort of roiling farce he is trying to escape. A penetrating look at rock and roll’s merger of art, commerce and urban decay, Great Jones Street “reflects our era’s nighmares and hallucinations with all appropriate lurid, tawdry shades
Review Website Ranks:
Among the cast of DeLillo’s bizarre yet fully realized characters in The Names are Kathryn, the narrator’s estranged wife; their son, the six-year-old novelist; Owen, the scientist; and the neurotic narrator obsessed with his own neuroses. A thriller, a mystery, and still a moving examination of family, loss, and the amorphous and magical potential of language itself,
Gary Harkness is a football player and student at Logos College, West Texas. During a season of unprecedented success on the football field, he becomes increasingly obsessed with the threat of nuclear war. Both frightened and fascinated by the prospect, he listens to his team-mates discussing match tactics in much the same terms as military generals might contemplate global conflict. Offering a timely and topical look at human beings’ obsession with conflict and confrontation, “End Zone” is a clever, playful and, above all, funny novel, which confirms DeLillo’s status as one of the great American writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and reaffirms the unerring incisive accuracy of his portrayal of the modern world.
Don DeLillo presents an extraordinary new novel about words and images, novelists and terrorists, the mass mind and the arch-individualist. At the heart of the book is Bill Gray, a famous reclusive writer who escapes the failed novel he has been working on for many years and enters the world of political violence, a nightscape of Semtex explosives and hostages locked in basement rooms. Bill’s dangerous passage leaves two people stranded: his brilliant, fixated assistant, Scott, and the strange young woman who is Scott’s lover–and Bill’s.
The Gladney’s family life is disrupted and threatened when an industrial accident sends a lethal cloud over their community. Jack Gladney struggles with the ensuing complications which include murder.
A 1950s teenage hood from New York is transformed by the Jesuits into a respectable man, managing hazardous waste. A portrait of the decade from the viewpoint of the garbage industry.
Don DeLillo chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald’s odyssey from troubled teenager to a man of precarious stability who imagines himself an agent of history. When “history” presents itself in the form of two disgruntled CIA operatives who decide that an unsuccessful attempt on the life of the president will galvanize the nation against communism, the scales are irrevocably tipped. A gripping, masterful blend of fact and fiction, alive with meticulously portrayed characters both real and created, Libra is a grave, haunting, and brilliant examination of an event that has become an indelible part of the American psyche.
| Book | Goodreads | Amazon | LibraryThing | Overal Rank |
| Libra | 1 | 3 | 2 | 1 |
| Underworld | 2 | 8 | 1 | 2 |
| White Noise | 3 | 6 | 3 | 3 |
| Mao II | 4 | 5 | 5 | 4 |
| End Zone | 5 | 4 | 6 | 5 |
| Amazons | 7 | 1 | 10 | 6 |
| The Names | 5 | 9 | 4 | 6 |
| Americana | 10 | 1 | 11 | 8 |
| Great Jones Street | 9 | 6 | 7 | 8 |
| Ratner’s Star | 8 | 13 | 9 | 10 |
| Point Omega | 10 | 11 | 13 | 11 |
| Running Dog | 12 | 15 | 7 | 11 |
| The Body Artist | 14 | 9 | 17 | 13 |
| Zero K | 14 | 16 | 11 | 14 |
| Falling Man | 17 | 11 | 14 | 15 |
| Players | 13 | 14 | 15 | 15 |
| Cosmopolis | 14 | 16 | 16 | 17 |
"What are the best Science Fiction And Fantasy books released in 2023?" We looked at…
"What are the best Graphic Novels And Comics books released in 2023?" We looked at…
"What are the best Science And Nature books released in 2023?" We looked at 278…
"What are the best Mystery, Horror, and Thriller books released in 2023?" We looked at…
"What are the best Nonfiction books released in 2023?" We looked at 428 of the…
"What are the best Fiction & Literature books released in 2023?" We looked at 448…