What does Veeky Forums think about Westerns?

i like the movie quite a bit.

Warlock is nowhere near the level of butchers crossing or blood meridian

Pynchon would disagree. And I would agree with him. It's probably the best of the three.

The Place of Dead Roads, highly recommended, but it's way-out-there, even more so than El Topo for example. WSB was really something else.

For my money, the best section of Heinlein's Time Enough For Love is The Tale Of The Adopted Daughter - the story where Lazarus Long sets out with just a wagon & wife into the wilderness in a sort of Wild West pioneer-type scenario. (The ending, where his wife ages but he doesn't, is even almost poignant.)

Been thinking about reading Lonesome Dove
Any input?

I enjoyed it a great deal and re read it from time to time. He isn’t the best prose writer but he has some witty dialogue and memorable characters. A couple of the sadder parts really stuck with me.

Blood meridian really good? It's always posted here and on /tv/ and /v/ as good source material.

its fantastic user, give it a go.

The writing style is not for everyone. It's one of my favorite books and it will stay with you long after you finish. Much better than The Road.

I've read The Road for high school and i thought it was piss easy like 5 years ago. If Blood Meridian is substantially harder to read then that probably means that it'll probably be just within my level

If you thought The Road was easy for a high school level you might not be reading it too deeply, because there are quite a lot of subtleties in his language.
Blood Meridian is very densely packed with allusions and what not so I'd recommend not going into it with a cocky mindset

Really love Train Dreams by Denis Johnson. Easily my favorite Western, though to be honest I'm not sure if it quite qualifies.

Lonesome Dove is probably my favorite western. Probably not up to Veeky Forums's snuff since it's not brooding and deep like Grampa NoQuotes.

Butchers Crossing is one my all-time favorite wrsterns.

The middle is the only actual Western there

99% genre quick reads, but you can find some gems.

how is Warlock not a western?

You haven't read the meme trilogy

I really love Warlock and blood meridian, haven't read butchers crossing. Is it decent?

I don't read mediocre 'literature'

Been reading to read Lonesome Dove for a while as people kept telling me it's better than Blood Meridian ( a book I love).

Need to read Warlock and Butcher's Crossing too. I'm sure if I enjoy Stoner I'll dive straight into Butcher's Crossing afterwards.

Surprised /tv/ and /v/ talk about it but I suppose there's bound to be crossover between our boards.

Yeah, it's phenomenal, but I wouldn't recommend Blood Meridian if you've never read Cormac McCarthy before - the pacing is going to exhaust you and you might find the prose to be dry.

user, are you new to Veeky Forums? Please don't view reading books like a video game, i.e. "it was piss easy." The Road really does offer a lot of substance but on the surface level it's near-empty.

Blood Meridian is genuinely a dense novel and it might be exhausting to read if you're just reading it for Veeky Forums points. Have you read Cormac McCarthy within the five years since you last read The Road?

I'm not trying to put you off, but Blood Meridian is seen as his magnum opus and I just don't want people rushing into the book so they can misunderstand its intentions and complain later that it's "boring."

it's an old meme. only BM gets talked about here though.

fpbp

love Blood Meridian
reading "the Virginian" by Owen Winter right now

what do you like about Warlock?
give me a quick rundown

Bought Blood Meridian yesterday and I'm really excited to read it, but people are saying this shouldn't be your first McCarthy book. Will I still enjoy it if the subject matter interests me?

Comfy

Y'all might like some Charles Portis.

Just reread BM. Fantastic and terrifying. I'd recommend reading Bloom's bit on it in How to Read and Why for some of the literary context. You don't need to, but it makes the experience more rich.

It was my first and only McCarthy book thus far and it's one of my favorite novels ever.

>genre fiction that has been cleverly elevated by a few authors. not much else to say about it.
This applies to all literature.

I think you're using 'genre' in a different sense than I.

Probably, but when you really look at a lot of literature, most of it really can be boiled into genre fiction.
The Odyssey is really just a fantasy story
Ulysseys is just slice of life
Catch-22 is just comedy and military
The Trial is just a court drama
Romeo and Juliet is just a romance

Clearly these stories are landmarks in writing and so much more than that and to boil them down is completely foolish, but it really comes down to innovation, technical skill, and depth that separates literature from genre fiction.

There's difference between a book being categorised into a certain genre, and it being genre fiction.

>There's difference between a book being categorised into a certain genre, and it being genre fiction.

I agree, it's why I said
>it really comes down to innovation, technical skill, and depth that separates literature from genre fiction.

>The Trial is just a court drama

No, your boiling down of those books to anachronistic genre elements that they were not writing in is anathema to good analysis. This only works if you ignore a good deal of not only the circumstances in which they were written but also ignore the fact that the genres you listed are poorly defined anachronisms that make no sense in describing them. Genre fiction is knowingly writing a story in a certain literary ecosystem if you'll forgive the analogy. It requires a certain knowledge of the other literature in this very particular and narrow field of writing, that knowledge typically comes in the form of tropes and cliche which have been calcified over a long period of time and bring the genre's characteristics into focus. This means that typically the works created within the genre are not defined on their own or with how they engage literature as whole, but how they engage with their narrow genre aesthetically and thematically. What makes genre fiction notable amongst it's brethren is usually two things:

1. It created the genre, typically by accident, and is a work of literary merit in it's own right. (this is the case of LOTR although it is important to note not all genres form in this way)

2. It subverts or otherwise deconstructs genre conventions in order to examine the underlying assumptions of the literature it is closely related to. This is more in line with the hyper-violent Blood Meridian (even this is too reductive, but when one speaks in categories reduction is inescapable).

What separates genre fiction from literary fiction, at least in my mind, is that literary fiction draws on and engages with the wider literary field, making it far more robust. Genre fiction on the other hand, engages with a very particular and small field which is why it tends to fall into cliche territory. This post is far from comprehensive but I hope you see where I'm coming from.

>I don't read
We know

>Lonesome Dove
preferred the series desu

It's a fair point, but you are really just extending what have said twice now

>It created the genre, typically by accident, and is a work of literary merit in it's own right. (this is the case of LOTR although it is important to note not all genres form in this way)
Innovation

>It subverts or otherwise deconstructs genre conventions in order to examine the underlying assumptions of the literature it is closely related to. This is more in line with the hyper-violent Blood Meridian (even this is too reductive, but when one speaks in categories reduction is inescapable).
Depth (as in there is more than meets the eye aka subversion, deconstruction, satire, ect)

What separates genre fiction from literary fiction, at least in my mind, is that literary fiction draws on and engages with the wider literary field, making it far more robust. Genre fiction on the other hand, engages with a very particular and small field which is why it tends to fall into cliche territory.
And yet someone like Faulkner, who entire works encompassed southern gothic novels (a genre) is still seen as literature and not genre fiction, even though he only worked in a very small field.

>knowledge typically comes in the form of tropes and cliche which have been calcified over a long period of time and bring the genre's characteristics into focus

This is your only real argument here, essentially that cliches and repetition of what already exist in the field of writing is what separates and having a wider frame of knowledge which really boils down to
>technical skill

I regret actually detailing a response instead of mocking you now.

Elmore Leonard is GOAT

It redoes the old Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday vs the Clanton gang story with a lot more moral ambiguity. There are some sympathetic Glantons and the Doc Holliday character is an out and out sociopath. Also there’s a pretty lengthy subplot regarding a miners strike and proto trade unionism in the Old West

Hombre was a lot of fun. Lots of great tough guy lines

seconding this

>Charles Portis
Good stuff. True Grit is probably my favorite western novel as well as film.

Leonard wrote some bretty gud short stories like Three-Ten to Yuma.

>this is the case of LOTR although it is important to note not all genres form in this way
are you seriously suggesting lotr created a genre? what genre might that be?

>enjoying books that have a message

modern fantasy is an exercise in reiterating and slightly subverting tropes established in lord of the rings. do not even pretend this is not the case.

Loved Blood Meridian, what do I go on to next?

Red Country by Joe Abercrombie was pretty fantastic.

No love for Hondo?