|
|
Post by Sprague Dawley on Oct 25, 2024 9:52:49 GMT
The Road
10/10
Was skulking around the library waiting for a record shop to open, grabbed this book just cos I'd seen his name somewhere and wft before I knew it I'd read 150 fucken pages!
WFT!
I can't even read!
I was shocked. It took about 2 hours but damn the time flew by.
Just an amazingly basic style here. Father and son traipsing along roads looking for food in some unexplained post-apocalypse. So simple. Like the Walking Dead telly show where they go scabbing for shit in houses. 150 pages in and fuck-all has happened.
The author dudes writing style is so barebones basic. Describes scene, ends paragraph with wistful poetic-like sentence, then a bit of utterly bog-standard dialogue
...
"You okay?"
"I'm okay."
"Okay then"
Rinse, repeat.
Don't think I've ever read a novel that makes writing a novel look so damn piss-easy. And him sowing that seed of effortlessness in my tiny brain makes me think this author dude must be some sort of grandmaster of the art of the novel or some shit ffs
|
|
|
|
Post by Sprague Dawley on Oct 25, 2024 11:13:53 GMT
All The Pretty Horses (1992)
Cried off after 15 pages.
15 pages of the most tediously dull and stultified dialogue I have ever read in my motherfucking life.
Why would the author think we want to read conversations between extremely boring people? Does he enjoy listening to conversations between extremely boring, uninteresting people? No? Then why inflict that moribund bullshit upon your reader? Fucking dickhead. Getting annoyed now. I'm confiscating all your writing awards, Mcarthy. OK, you can keep the one you probably got for "The Road" but that's it. All the rest, confiscated until you personally apologise to me for this dogshit book.
1/10
|
|
|
|
Post by jethro on Nov 2, 2024 11:04:07 GMT
Found this on goo reads, from when I first broke my Cormac cherry:
"Damn, not a ringing endorsement of man as his brother's keeper, is it? Maybe the violentist book I ever read. Sort of like Tarantino does the old testament. This was my first foray into Cormac McCarthyism and I aim to go further. I do indeed. I'm curious to see if a guy could keep up such grimness over the course of his whole writing career. (I've seen the movie with the haircut guy and that was certainly grim)
This book had some of the best action writing I've ever read. Really knock one on one's ass stuff. And the moralizing, or anti-moralizing, I guess, of "the judge" is really juicy. Biblical. At times the apocalyptic tone gets to be so much as to veer into black comedy territory, and maybe that was the intention? Anyway, highly recommended. As long as you're not going to be traumatized by the image of naked savages double-fisting infants and windmill-dunking them against large rocks and whatnot. Spoiler alert."
|
|
|
|
Post by Sprague Dawley on Nov 3, 2024 5:50:00 GMT
Damn, is that for All The Pretty Horses? Maybe I gave up too quick.... naked savages double-fisting infants and windmill-dunking them against large rocks  |
|
|
|
Post by jethro on Nov 3, 2024 12:58:47 GMT
Damn, is that for All The Pretty Horses? Maybe I gave up too quick.... naked savages double-fisting infants and windmill-dunking them against large rocks No no, this is for Blood Meridian. Thanks for exposing a flaw in my cut & paste technique. haha, I'm still new to this message board thing. I thought All the Pretty Horses was great too, but that trilogy (APH, The Crossing & Cities of the Plain) have a little bit of that tv miniseries feel as far as drama an dialogue. Speaks to the old boy's range in my opinion. I'd recommend all his shit...there are some good one's about a mental defective hillbilly that fucks everybody's dead bodies. Theres a fella that gets pinched for fucking watermelons in the wild. Mcarthy has great range. I think you just have to deal with a little sappy dialogue in a few of the westerns. no |
|
|
|
Post by Sprague Dawley on Nov 11, 2024 3:01:56 GMT
So "The Road" is a bit of an outlier?
Bugger all happens in that one, no cannibal corpsing or napalm infanticide.
Might have to have a nosey next time I'm in library
|
|
|
|
Post by Sprague Dawley on Nov 22, 2024 10:44:47 GMT
|
|
