Holy shit, I wasn't expecting this to be such a hard read. It is a rather popular book...

shut up bitch

plebeian samefagging

I got over it after the first few pages. It usually takes me a couple pages to get used to an author's style. The only thing that I won't bother with is ye olde tyme bullshit.

I didn't like the book too much but the ending was fantastic, so it was worth it.

Nope

also if you think this book is 'hard to read' give up on this hobby

I can't read for shit but I don't get how people consider this difficult. There's a straightforward chronological narrative with tons of action and only two important characters. they even fucking summarize the chapters in bullet points at the beginning of each chapter.

I couldn't read The Odyssey, Pride & Prejudice, The Divine Comedy, and a several other high school tier books, but for whatever reason this book gave me no issues at all.

The content isn't hard for me, merely the form. And I do get the "big picture".

But unless I keep in mind that it is "this book" I'm reading, I'm going to miss the meaning of a sentence here and there. Of course I notice this, so I simply re-read them. Thus, the book ends up being pretty exhausting/"hard" to read.

Might just be the fact that I am not a native English speaker tho, maybe for natives its a bit easier to get used to queer punctuation.

I'm sorry to say this, but you're all not reading this close enough, and you're coming off as slightly moronic.

The style is purposefully biblical, Cormac is trying to convey a cruel world or religion, blood and sand and there are several throwbacks to the OT in the book. The methodical, robust style is purposeful, and it creates a dehumanized account of violence - pay attention to the extreme gore Cormac describes and how he contrasts it to the total lack of interior emotion or thought his characters are shown to have. His prose verges on that of an automaton at times, cruelly trampling over characters like ants in a cog. There's a pretty interesting and rather apocalyptic philosophy to Cormac, and I think it could be argued to be borne out of the very mechanical celebration of violence our culture seems to exhibit, something deadening and numbing we all gather round to see, like a game of sports or toy wars.

I don't think Blood Meridian is a masterpeice or his best work, and plot and meaning are often sacrificed in his attempts to stylize (I think All The Pretty Horses had a more subtle prose style, which is what I've included in my post) but his prose definitely has purpose, it's unfair to call it complete authorial masturbation.

I don't know about any of that bible garbage but it reads like it was written by a cowboy who didn't go to school for very long.

user, you are an idiot.

I thought The Road was really easy to read. Is this much harder?

was the judge satan himself

Well the road doesn't have hillbilly ebonics like in BM.

Lots of spanish, and you'll be looking up a lot of words that end up just being other names for buckets and rivers

>and the sun was hot and the kid was hungry and his feet hurt so he cooked some beans and tortillas and the landscape was pretty and he ate the beans and tortillas and he spat and they rode on

this is all great and i've heard it a million times, but i still find the style turgid and the sentences impossible to comprehend without retreating to the dictionary every third word to lookup a desert plant. it's just a bore and a slog. the old testament had its genetic tables but the rest was fun effed up stories of early civilization.

You probably didn't understand it

>Blood Meridian
>difficult

You probably didn't understand it

The crickets and the rust-beetles scuttled among the nettles of the sage thicket. "Vámonos, amigos," he whispered, and threw the busted leather flintcraw over the loose weave of the saddlecock. And they rode on in the friscalating dusklight.

QUE?

*spits*

user, please... just kys.

wow, writing is so much better without quotation marks, unnecessary debris your eye has to see, cluttering up the page

I think a demon or some deity of war.

You probably didn't understand it

>The style is purposefully biblical
You don't say. Wow, did you figure all that out by yourself? Did you notice though how God knew how to use proper punctuation? Or at least his Holy Spirit had the decency to inspire some English translators with a lot better prose and infinitely more substance than St. Cormac the Hack.

You probably didn't understand it

He was war. The avatar of war made manifest by the madness and bloodshed of the Wild West.

>all these fucking idiots blaming the text for their own incompetence

They ain't nothing
*spits*
*rapes a squaw*

do tell me what good does the odd punctuation do for the book's content

I can deal with everything else, but that stuff never made the book better for me; it was merely a hardship to endure, something that sometimes momentarily confused me, never felt like it added to the good qualities of the work.
yet some people seem to think that it makes the prose more "fluid" or "more like real talking" or whatever

That's because it does, the book imitates actual speech

I mean OK, it was a stylistic choice that neither made nor broke the book for me.

This kind of analysis seems completely asspulled to me. I'm not beyond the concept of punctuation and presentation of text changing the feeling of a book, it just seems that McCarthy does the same thing all the time and after reading more than 2 of his books it becomes obvious that the whole "harsh and detached" bit is not unique and thus arguably not intended. It's a gimmick that adds little to the experience.