Is it actually worth reading or is it just a meme?

Is it actually worth reading or is it just a meme?

It's a meme worth reading, then you can read his superior 99% meme-free novels.

It's worth reading, but there's moments of ambiguity and repetition that alienates a few readers from enjoying it.

I don't think Tortilla-posters have read McCarthy before.

Are there any you would recommend other than The Road?

I've heard the epilogue is really inexplicable but what are the other moments of amibguity?

Suttree is great.

Worth it, but take the most sloggining techniques you saw in Moby Dick and amplify that by ten thousand. You wouldn't think a man could describe a pretty standard dusty ass landscape so many ways.

Just generally gets monotonous, so get ready for that. But ultimately it's rewarding.

Pretty corncobby derivative, with pretty boring prose tricks cultivated in the American masculine line, but a damn good story with mezmerizing, musical moments nonetheless.

I agree with Bloomey that this is one of the canons most important American works after As I Lay Dying.

Not genius, but talented.

As retarded as it sounds, its like reading a painting. I've never experienced that effect before in a book. You should absolutely read it.

The ending of the novel - the last encounter between "the kid" and "the judge" is pretty ambiguous in how they interact with each other. I've heard a few interpretations now regarding if The Judge raped the kid or that The Judge is actually Satan.

Honestly, OP. I think it's worth reading but the pacing of it is probably quite repetitive at times and I can understand that due to that, it can be off-putting. If you're still interested, I would recommend it but maybe after reading some of McCarthy's other works (just to see if his prose style is to your liking).

Its a great book. Moments and lines from this book will stick in your craw for a long time.

I can confirm this is true.

> A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or saber done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.

> The jagged mountains were pure blue in the dawn and everywhere birds twittered and the sun when it rose caught the moon in the west so that they lay opposed to each other across the earth, the sun whitehot and the moon a pale replica, as if they were the ends of a common bore beyond whose terminals burned worlds past all reckoning.

> The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the 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.

Just a few quotes from the book that I love to pieces. You'll find yourself wanting to re-read passages you come across because of their pure beauty.

Its an excellent book, smeared by a couple of (one?) faggots on here that are turning contrarian on it since the Veeky Forums top 100 exposed it to Reddit.

And if you read it in a banal, uncomplicated way it is an excellent western with a cool bad guy.

it's worth every second you take to enjoy it
it may be a little monotonous at time but really does say it perfectly, but if the novel is trying to paint in vivid detail to you a picture, and a picture is worth a thousand words, then therein lies the monotony.

it is intensely shitty and boring. also stupid as fuck. if you like tortillas and having the violent parts of books quickly glossed over, it might be for you. 10 pages of scenery a few paragraphs of violence. you wait the entire book for shit to go down. then when it does its over in a heartbeat. you can pretty much skip the first 3/4 of the book because nothing happens. then once the gang somehow manages to get ambushed (how the fuck did this happen. it's so stupid) it starts to get better. honestly it's a waste of time. don't read this book. people just post about it to trick others into reading it, like infinite jest. if you want to read his good books read suttree or the crossing. every time a character spat, I spit into my book. it completely ruined my copy.

It's good. It's a weird and atmospheric book but there's some scenes that are just so imaginative.

Would skip a lot of McCarthy's other work though.

Literally every Veeky Forums memebook is worth reading. They all start out with General literary merit and then get spammed into meme status.

not sure exactly where in the book, but when he describes the sun rays casting shadows that look like pencils on the ground from the smallest pebbles i had to stop reading and look up to absorb what i just read

liking genre fiction this much

I know the section you mean, user. So many fantastic moments within this book.

Pretty much this. It's complete shit with an overblown reputation

I've not read Blood Meridian, but I've read No Country for Old Men and All The Pretty Horses and really liked both. The latter more than the former. His style is unique, and his use of Spanish is excellent (I am a fluent speaker too). Though I believe some passages might not be as great for you if you have to stop to look up a translation or a dictionary, so if you read him I recommend you have the translated Spanish dialogue ready.

I liked the book a lot, but the constant violence, and the use of 'and it was like this and he had that and the kid spat and then they rode on.' was a little draining to read.

I'll stick it in your mum's craw faget

it's fine

cormac is way too edgy and needlessly pessimistic for me. i guess if you think it's cool to be angsty i could reccomend it, otherwise i'd say read hemingway or faulkner instead if its cormac's style you're looking for

why did they spit so much back then?

as much as people like to degrade this book for whatever reasons they feel that it falls short, reading excerpts from it always reminds me of how much I loved wrestling with it.
It's a slog when it's a slog, but when it's gorgeous it sets the standard.

because it's cool

Have you read suttree? The descriptions I have heard of it sound different from the McCormac norm. I am kind of tired with the violence and shit in The Road and Blood Meridian but I do like his writing a lot.

I have heard Suttree is the biggest Faulkner rip off but just like endless fucking descriptions.

All the Pretty Horses is a good in between in terms of violence.

Also,
>The Road is violent meme

desu out of all the books i've ever read, blood meridian probably has the most beautiful prose

>Also,
>>The Road is violent meme

Icky, gruesome? I remember a description of a roasted baby.

>Suttree is a Faulkner ripoff
it's semiautobiographical fool. McCarthy wrote it about his early life, the characters are based on real people

I just started it and the first chapter (or did I read two?) was really hard on me. I've never before read whole pages before realising I haven't been actually following at all. At my best I kept reading two sentences and then going back one because I wasn't sure if I'd even read the letters on the page just now.

His prose seems very jarring to me, and it seems very passionate about being as jarring as possible. It's hard to follow. I hate how the dialogue blends right in, I hate how hard it is for me to pay attention and figure out what's going on. It's like an uneasy dream in a way, the way he paints pictures and forces the dialogue in there.

I'm not a native Anglophone but I've read most of my books in English and I have never experienced anything like this. I'm fine with long sentences but Jesus fucking Christ I'm not sure if I can deal with this. Am I just not ready for it?

>starting at the top
yeah, don't so that.
All memeing aside that book is really dense and it never lets up and if you try to force it you'll end up like that guy that shitposts every McCarthy thread.

Start with Suttree. Then Outer Dark and Child of God. Border Trilogy is optional.
Its good to have at least some of the Bible under your belt, King James.

>implying hemingway and faulkner are similar

read Butcher's Crossing instead

>Are there any you would recommend other than The Road?
Suttree is great.
All the Pretty Horses is slightly less great

cn i get a pdf homeboys

>reading for morals
>not enjoying the imagery

you'll learn eventually