Walk While Reading

Currently Reading……

Is this book going to be my Great Gatsby…? Read fifty pages this morning before I started work and was completely captured. I was in awe. I was smiling from ear to ear thinking, now this my kind of book. I know I know, you’re thinking, what you’ve never read this before. Believe it or not, there’s a lot I haven’t read. I took my early twenties off, remember.

thebloomsburytwo:

Book Review

The Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

As Jon touched on in his review earlier this is my second attempt at this novel. The first time didn’t go so well. I didn’t know what I was getting into, I didn’t have my head on straight.

I’m really not sure what possessed Jon and I to pick this book for our little reading group. We both respect and love Cormac, but I don’t believe either one of us were prepared for this piece of work.

This book is tough to describe. In simple terms we start the novel following “the kid” a down on his luck young guy who falls in line with a group of scalp hunters.  This group may be the worst people on the planet at that time. They kill, destroy, wreck everything they come across. Glanton is their leader but the story is about the Judge.

I talked to Jon on the phone last night. I said “You know who the Judge reminds me of, Marlon Brando from Apocalypse Now.” I can’t help but wonder if the Judge may be the worst character ever written about in modern literature. He never goes away, he’s always there, haunting the reader like a shadow. It’s amazing the Judge can be an worse then the rest of the characters in this book. He’s not only worse, he’s worse by a long shot. I hated the Judge, I hated Glanton, I disliked the Kid.

There is not a single redeemable thing about anyone in this book. Yet you read on. You can’t help yourself. Cormac knows his nature, he knows that natural world we live in like no other. He can describe a rock down to its last crack. At times daunting it provides a prose that tick tick ticks along. You have to have your reading shoes on for this one. You can’t half ass it.

In closing all I can say if you decide to read this novel be in the right head space. If you’re feeling down and blue, maybe skip it until you’re feeling sure of yourself. It will come at you hard and tough. There’s something in it that I can’t describe. Maybe if you read it you can tell me what that something is.

Casey

thebloomsburytwo:

Blood Meridian, Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy

There is no way to get to the bottom of what McCarthy was trying to do in this book with my precious little capsule review here on tumblr.  There were a few things I knew about this book before I started reading.  Harold Bloom had put it down twice before finally finishing.  Casey had done the same.  And my brother, who I had lent this book to earlier this year, had done the same as well.  I was given vague reasons why this was so - the extreme violence, and a character known as the judge.  I had been warned.

This book is saturated with blood.  We follow a young man, known only as ‘the kid’, until he joins up with a group of scalphunters lead by a man named Glanton and a mysterious judge named Holden.  The Glanton Gang murder, torture, and burn just about everything they come across.  McCarthy used the violence in the book as a part of the setting, just like the desert, or the horses.  It was constant.  The horror was constant.  There is an underlying terror here as well.  Things unsaid or alluded to that we just don’t want to admit we know.  These allusions create the monster that is the judge.

We are shown a group of heinous, amoral men carrying out the worst crimes man can perform on one another.  Then McCarthy shows us the judge, saying almost, “Look how terrible I have made this man.  Look how he stands out amongst this group of evil men, even, as a purest evil.”  The others have been swallowed up by the gang and have fallen in line.  They are unthinking monsters.  The judge is different, he is intelligent and can articulate what he is doing.  He knows exactly what his actions mean, yet carries them out all the same.  Scary, tough, tough read, but a must.

Original NYT Review here.

Well written Jon.

Did you guys/girls see this last week…..? A previously unreleased in english  John Updike interview. Published in The New Yorker for the first time.

There’s some serious gems in here like his comments on other authors. This one being one:

“But I find that Faulkner, even in his best novels, just goes on too long and has something kind of uncontrolled. I found that the people who by and large really enjoy Faulkner are fellow Southerners and, since I’m not a Southerner, I seem to be outside the club of ardent Faulkner lovers.”

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A conversation with Nick Cave.

My daughter Ayla was the happiest Snow Princess on the planet last night and no I did not put Hurley in that Bumble Bee costume.

“The first time I read Blood Meridian, I was so appalled that while I was held, I gave up after about 60 pages. I don’t think I was feeling very well then anyway; my health was going through a bad time, and it was more than I could take. But it intrigued me, because there was no question about the quality of the writing, which is stunning. So I went back a second time, and I got, I don’t remember… 140, 150 pages, and then, I think it was the Judge who got me. He was beginning to give me nightmares just as he gives the kid nightmares. And then the third time, it went off like a shot. I went straight through it and was exhilarated. I said, “My God! This reminds me of Thomas Pynchon at his best, or Nathanael West.” It was the greatest single book since Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.”

Harold Bloom on reading The Blood Meridian.

Proust.

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