Do you read?

[V01]

That's something I struggle with too, having to go back and re-read to see who's saying what really breaks the flow.

[Chindie]

Exactly. You get into a flow and then suddenly it's 'wait, who's talking again? Or is someone even taking?' and you have to backtrack to get your bearing again.

Literally the only author I've ever had to do this with.

[OutByEaster?]

I loved The Road, I like the way it's written, the characters and the sense it brings you about how we're all wired and what the world around us is.

I liked All the pretty horses a lot too - but I'm struggling with Blood Meridian which seems to be a succession of beautifully written descriptions of landscape and violent set pieces to no particular end - it's like a Steven Seagal movie directed by Wim Wenders.

 

[The_Rev]

You should read a study of Blood Meridian once you've finished the novel.  It will open your eyes to lots of hidden stuff you may have missed. 

The Road is a great book too, I'm not sure what you'd make of it if you saw the movie first as while it touches on most of the same points it tones down just how horrible their post apocalyptic world is.  I think perhaps having a visual idea of it from the movie going in means that it will never be quite as bleak.  

 

I've not long finished The Man in the High Castle. I've not seen the TV show and by all accounts it takes quite a departure from the source material but the book is excellent. 

[OutByEaster?]

31 minutes ago, The_Rev said:

I've not long finished The Man in the High Castle. I've not seen the TV show and by all accounts it takes quite a departure from the source material but the book is excellent. 

I had a bit of a PKD obsession in my youth - his stuff is a great read, right through from the early magazine aimed short stories to the out there drug induced bananas-ness of something like Valis. He's never a dull read.

I'll have a look at the study as you recommend - It's just not doing anything for me at the moment - maybe things will be more apparent as it builds to a finish, but I suspect that's not how it's going to work.

The Road is brilliant because of dread, because of how wonderfully it captures and amplifies that natural feeling of protection that's in every person Its setting is interesting, and the apocalyptic element of the book is important - but at heart it's a book about how scary it is to have and care about a child - it's a romanticised eulogy to the love of family - albeit wrapped in that absolute dread. You know the ending is unlikely to be a happy one, but like the man on the road as a reader you keep going in the hope that something will change or happen and come to realise that actually the result isn't the only matter of importance, that there's a value in and of the struggle itself.

 

 

 

[Stevo985]

8 hours ago, Chindie said:

I had a huge problem with the way he uses punctuation. He doesn't use quotations, simply because he doesn't like them. But they serve a purpose. If a book is well written and a character speaks the quotations are a subconscious marker to adjust the way your reading, to embody the character in that speech.

When I read and am engrossed in a book, I'm almost not consciously reading the words, instead I'm almost mentally picturing the scenes in my head and my eyes are on autopilot devouring the text. I see a quote and i understand who's speaking and their character and attitude is immediately added to the words.

I can't do that with McCarthy. His prose means it can be confused as to who is talking, or even if they are talking until you spot the give away words, or whether it's actually the narration. I banged my head against that on Blood Meridian until I gave up.

I may be odd in that regard though. I kinda view McCarthy as a author hipster, too cool for quotations, so **** him.

Yeah I get that.

But I think it's something you get used to. Once you've read a few chapters you just adjust to it. That's how it worked for me. I grew to enjoy the lack of punctuation. It's different.

 

It's similar to Trainspotting that I mentioned earlier in the thread. The first few chapters were incredibly un-enjoyable for me because it took me about 10 minutes to read a page.
But once you get used to the style it starts to flow.

[Ginko]

9 hours ago, Chindie said:

I had a huge problem with the way he uses punctuation. He doesn't use quotations, simply because he doesn't like them. But they serve a purpose. If a book is well written and a character speaks the quotations are a subconscious marker to adjust the way your reading, to embody the character in that speech.

When I read and am engrossed in a book, I'm almost not consciously reading the words, instead I'm almost mentally picturing the scenes in my head and my eyes are on autopilot devouring the text. I see a quote and i understand who's speaking and their character and attitude is immediately added to the words.

I can't do that with McCarthy. His prose means it can be confused as to who is talking, or even if they are talking until you spot the give away words, or whether it's actually the narration. I banged my head against that on Blood Meridian until I gave up.

I may be odd in that regard though. I kinda view McCarthy as a author hipster, too cool for quotations, so **** him.

Exactly how I felt when I read The Road. Different for the sake of it, either that or he was abused by a comma during childhood.

His lack of punctuation is to the detriment of his writing, which is a shame because he uses some wonderful imagery. I struggled to get through that book. I know it's meant to be bleak but it's just so damn boring in places and like you I kept get pulled out of the flow of the narrative because of his awkward writing style.

Hipster is a good word for it.

[CarewsEyebrowDesigner]

I disagree entirely. Writing is an art and authors are free to make any stylistic choices they want. I only ask that they are consistent and McCarthy is so that is fair enough in my book.

 

[mjmooney]

Cormac McCarthy, James Joyce (Ulysses, Finnegan's Wake), Iain M. Banks (Feersum Enjin), Russell Hoban (Ridley Walker), Irvine Welsh, loads of others. Nonstandard English of various sorts. Usually hard work initially, but OK once you get into the swing. 

[Ginko]

1 hour ago, CarewsEyebrowDesigner said:

I disagree entirely. Writing is an art and authors are free to make any stylistic choices they want. I only ask that they are consistent and McCarthy is so that is fair enough in my book.

Colour me surprised you like something hipster-ish 

But yeah, it's artistic licence. That's fine, I'm not condemning it and some people obviously like it, I just think it's done for the sake of it and doesn't bring anything to the story. It's good to break convention when it offers something new and interesting but it just doesn't do that for me when it comes to writing for some reason.

It might be worth saying I'm a writer/editor/proofreader by trade so maybe it's no surprise that bending the rules of language and grammar irks me a bit.

[Stevo985]

I found the dialogue in McCarthy's novels to work particularly well using his style. It read more like a script, which meant it was uninterrupted by he said, she replied, they exclaimed etc

Although the unapologetic use of large amounts of Spanish was a bit confusing, even for a semi spanish speaker!

[mjmooney]

Quote

Cormac McCarthy has been—as one 1965 reviewer of his first novel, The Orchard Tree, dubbed him—a “disciple of William Faulkner.” He makes admirable use of Faulknerian traits in his prose, and I’d always assumed he inherited his punctuation style from Faulkner as well. But in his very rare 2008 televised interview with Oprah Winfrey, McCarthy cites two other antecedents: James Joyce and forgotten novelist MacKinlay Kantor, whose Andersonville won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955. Joyce’s influence dominates, and in discussion of punctuation, McCarthy stresses that his minimalist approach works in the interest of maximum clarity. Speaking of Joyce, he says,

James Joyce is a good model for punctuation. He keeps it to an absolute minimum. There’s no reason to blot the page up with weird little marks. I mean, if you write properly you shouldn’t have to punctuate.

So what “weird little marks” does McCarthy allow, or not, and why? Below is a brief summary of his stated rules for punctuation:

1. Quotation Marks:

McCarthy doesn’t use ’em. In his Oprah interview, he says MacKinlay Kantor was the first writer he read who left them out. McCarthy stresses that this way of writing dialogue requires particular deliberation. Speaking of writers who have imitated him, he says, “You really have to be aware that there are no quotation marks, and write in such a way as to guide people as to who’s speaking.” Otherwise, confusion reigns.

2. Colons and semicolons:

Careful McCarthy reader Oprah says she “saw a colon once” in McCarthy’s prose, but she never encountered a semicolon. McCarthy confirms: “No semicolons.”

Of the colon, he says: “You can use a colon, if you’re getting ready to give a list of something that follows from what you just said. Like, these are the reasons.” This is a specific occasion that does not present itself often. The colon, one might say, genuflects to a very specific logical development, enumeration. McCarthy deems most other punctuation uses needless.

3. All other punctuation:

Aside from his restrictive rationing of the colon, McCarthy declares his stylistic convictions with simplicity: “I believe in periods, in capitals, in the occasional comma, and that’s it.” It’s a discipline he learned first in a college English class, where he worked to simplify 18th century essays for a textbook the professor was editing. Early modern English is notoriously cluttered with confounding punctuation, which did not become standardized until comparatively recently.

McCarthy, enamored of the prose style of the Neoclassical English writers but annoyed by their over-reliance on semicolons, remembers paring down an essay “by Swift or something” and hearing his professor say, “this is very good, this is exactly what’s needed.” Encouraged, he continued to simplify, working, he says to Oprah, “to make it easier, not to make it harder” to decipher his prose. For those who find McCarthy sometimes maddeningly opaque, this statement of intent may not help clarify things much. But lovers of his work may find renewed appreciation for his streamlined syntax.

Link

[OutByEaster?]

On 13 June 2016 at 00:56, The_Rev said:

You should read a study of Blood Meridian once you've finished the novel.  It will open your eyes to lots of hidden stuff you may have missed.

 

I finished it, and read a couple of short things about it and had a bit of a think.

Spoiler

I think there are a couple of interpretations that occurred to me while reading it - one being a sort of outward facing, 'big' one with the boy as the new American century - a blank sheet formed in violence, Glanton as the remains of imperialism and the old world, the ex-priest as the land and the Judge as the coming America - violent, self centred, nasty, but intelligent, able to inspire, the Judge as science.

The one I like, and that didn't occur to me until the last ten pages is that the ex-priest and the judge are both not real, that they're the two parts of the kids psyche fighting one another for his future. A broken mind with influences. It makes sense of the desert scene where the Judge is stalking the kid and the ex-priest and the ex-priest tells him to kill him and then if he can't do that to kill the horses "You think you can beat him? No. Kill the horses" is almost an admittance by his conscience that he know he can't fight the evil within his soul (in the form of the judge) and that he'd be better killing the horses and dying in the desert. 

It fits in also with the ending where the scene that we don't have described to us in the place where the kid has finally given in to the Judges embrace is too easily assumed to be the Judge raping and killing the kid, but could very well be the kid raping and killing the little girl whose bear was killed. A final collapse into the evil in his soul and the figurative devil, the Judge, dancing freely and never dying - even though the kid surely would.  

I think there's a lot to be said for that interpretation and I may read it again one day with that in mind.

I'm also reminded of the film The Machinist where there's a similar role of the vengeful evil in the mind of a broken man and that the character resembles the way I'd picture the judge - I wonder if the film was influenced by the novel.

With all that said, I'm still not sure I liked it as a book - it takes forever introducing it's antagonists as antagonists, it offers no insight into them, there's no development of character, no understanding opened up to the reader of those that take lead roles - and though as it works its way toward an ending there's plenty of room for conjecture, thought and study, I found it ultimately an empty shell, a beautifully written essay on a topic that is obscured by the novel.

 

[sharkyvilla]

I've always been a fan of Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther books so I've started his Scott Manson ones based around a fictional football club.  The first book started badly and had lots of 'Don't I know a lot about football' stuff by Kerr but actually turned out to be a decent whodunnit.  The second book so far has been better written.

[theboyangel]

Just started The Fireman by Joe Hill, roughly a quarter of the way through and it's an interesting read and concept.

[OutByEaster?]

I should confess I hadn't noticed McCarthy's lack of punctuation in either The Road or All the pretty horses. 

 

[AVFC_Hitz]

I've found one of my favourite ever books in a bookshop here in Sofia. I'd lost it in the many moves I've made over the years.

Nicholas Shakespeare's Snowleg.

A really good book about East Berlin and young love. It's a book I read when I was 15 but it was still incredibly powerful when I read it in two days, last week.

Think 'The Lives of Other's' - in book form.

[Seat68]

Finished Jon Ronsons latest last week, So you've been publicly shamed. It details the aftermath of people, usually on Twitter, that have fallen foul of a pitchfork wielding angry mob. As someone that despises faux outrage and people that need to have a victim, this was a very interesting read. 

[mjmooney]

Where the hell can I get an affordable copy of Thomas Wolfe's "O Lost"? 

[theboyangel]

Has anyone read Neil Gaiman's American Gods??

Found a copy today and heard its been made into a TV series