I’ve read all of his books at least twice (except his 2 newest that i was saving for some reason), and have read Blood Meridian I don’t know how many times. I think I’ve spent so many hours with his words I’m probably sadder than I should be, but for reasons I can at least understand. I can go back in time reading my posts and can easily tell when I was under the influence of Cormac too heavily. Punctuation be damned and run on sentences galore. Spoiler “The horrors of the past lose their edge, and in the doing they blind us to a world careening toward a darkness beyond the bitterest speculation. It’s sure to be interesting. When the onset of universal night is finally acknowledged as irreversible even the coldest cynic will be astonished at the celerity with which every rule and stricture shoring up this creaking edifice is abandoned and every aberrancy embraced. It should be quite a spectacle. However brief.”
Read Blood Meridian two weeks ago and finished NCFOM last week. Both are all time favs after the first read (BM especially). NCFOM is my favorite movie. RIP
dude created maybe the two best representations of evil in Anton Chigurh (NCFOM) and the Judge (Blood Meridian) my favorite quotes/passages from by far my favorite book, Blood Meridian. Don't open this if you haven't read the book. If you haven't read the book, do so Spoiler - There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto - What's wrong with you is wrong all the way through you - He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things - The straight and the winding way are one - There's little equity in the Lord's gifts - God speaks in the least of creatures - The smallest crumb can devour us - For whoever makes a shelter of reeds and hides has joined his spirit to the common destiny of creatures and he will subside back into the primal mud with scarcely a cry. But who builds in stone seeks to alter the structure of the universe and so it was with these masons however primitive their works may seem to us - The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day. He loves games? Let him play for stakes - Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth - The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his fate - Even in this world this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others - The worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard - What joins men together is not the sharing of bread but the sharing of enemies - Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance
some tidbits from the NYT and WaPo: - Mr. McCarthy sold his archives, 98 boxes of letters, drafts, notes and unpublished work, to Texas State University in 2008 for $2 million. A year later, the Olivetti typewriter on which he’d written each of his novels sold at auction for $254,500. He immediately began working on a new Olivetti, the same model, purchased for less than $20. - He signed 250 copies of “The Road” and gave them all to his younger son John, “so when he turns 18 he can sell them and go to Las Vegas or whatever.” - “People ask me, ‘Why are you interested in physics?’,” he was quoted as saying in a 2007 Rolling Stone profile. “But why would you not be? To me, the most curious thing of all is incuriosity.” - “I think about John (his son) all the time and what the world’s going to be like,” Mr. McCarthy told Rolling Stone. “If the family situation was different, I could see taking John and going to New Zealand. It’s a civilized place. ” - “Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing,” he told the Journal in 2009, explaining why he wrote novels rather than short stories. He added: “Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don’t have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. It’s not a good arrangement. If I were God, I wouldn’t have done it that way.” - Some saw the novel (Suttree) as a farewell to his raucous old life. He stopped drinking before the novel was published. “The friends I do have are simply those who quit drinking,” he said. “If there is an occupational hazard to writing, it’s drinking.”
I’ll have to reread what I have and snap up some of the stuff that I haven’t. Personally, his style never resonated with me, but he was obviously a force in the genre.
Only book I ever was The Road and it was fantastic. May have to find another copy to read again + a few others.
you can tell because it reads so easy and is exactly like the movie. like, most of it is word for word, scene for scene, as he described. maybe the most readable book I have ever picked up
Along with The Road, it is probably the most approachable of his works. BM is closer in style to the others, imo.
I've always avoided the road given how depressing the movie is, but if it is as crushable as no country, I may have to
Ha, I’ve never watched the movie because of how depressing the book is. It’s been a while but I seem to remember running through it pretty quick.
For me, BM was an easy read because I felt like it was like pages of interesting moments that lead into several incredibly memorable scenes/events that play out over several pages that just get burned into your memory. By the end of it it feels like you’ve read a western and a horror novel. Also, The Judge is easily the greatest villain in fiction. I get that a lot of people think that the violence and racist language are the biggest reason the film hasn’t been made yet but I’m willing to bet that everyone who’s been attached to the project has bowed out when they realize they can’t possibly find an actor to replicate The Judge
Strongly disagree Child of God The Road NCFOM All the Pretty Horses Outer Dark The Passenger All way more accessible Then move onto The Crossing Cities of the Plain The Orchard Keeper BM Suttree