What It Takes by Richard Ben Cramer is a monumental work, exploring the complex dynamics of the 1988 presidential election. Spanning over 1,000 pages, it covers the campaigns of George H.W. Bush, Michael Dukakis, Bob Dole, Dick Gephardt, Gary Hart, and Joe Biden, with appearances by figures like Al Gore and Jesse Jackson. 

Don DeLillo’s Underworld is, in many ways, the novel I thought I was going to write when I imagined my first book back in my early 20s. At that time, I had this idea for a novel tentatively titled Trash or Summa Americana, a wide-ranging postmodern exploration of trash and its intersection with violence and politics in the United States. But as I began to conceptualize it, I was intimidated by the sheer scale and complexity of the project—how to weave together multiple cities, characters, and intersecting plots into a cohesive narrative. And that’s exactly what DeLillo achieves in Underworld.