Is it a review if I don't finish it?

Hi,

So, I picked up Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy because Vincent Baker had read it because it'd been recommended to him as a sort of Evil version of Dogs in the Vineyard. The premise seemed kinda neat -- a young kid signs up with a band of men to clear out Native Americans in Texas and things go all mindless inhumanist from there.

I like dystopias and Humans Behaving Badly so I got it through interlibrary loan.

I got 100 pages in and decided I'd rather read something else. Not because it was too violent or even necessarily boring. But it just kinda....droned. There was this relentless This, Now This, Now This, kinda plotting going on. It had this strange quirky rhythm to it that I couldn't get into.

Also? No quotation marks. Speech, action, and description all just kinda run together. I suppose that sorta fits with his general atmosphere of men trudging through an endless wasteland, but it kept forcing this re-reading and re-parsing that really disrupted things. There was a strong Moby Dick flavor to the writing which just didn't help at all.

Someone else might be able to grok it better than I did, but I'm glad I got this one through the library.

later
Tom

Is it a review if I don't finish it?

Hi,

So, I picked up Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy because Vincent Baker had read it because it'd been recommended to him as a sort of Evil version of Dogs in the Vineyard. The premise seemed kinda neat -- a young kid signs up with a band of men to clear out Native Americans in Texas and things go all mindless inhumanist from there.

I like dystopias and Humans Behaving Badly so I got it through interlibrary loan.

I got 100 pages in and decided I'd rather read something else. Not because it was too violent or even necessarily boring. But it just kinda....droned. There was this relentless This, Now This, Now This, kinda plotting going on. It had this strange quirky rhythm to it that I couldn't get into.

Also? No quotation marks. Speech, action, and description all just kinda run together. I suppose that sorta fits with his general atmosphere of men trudging through an endless wasteland, but it kept forcing this re-reading and re-parsing that really disrupted things. There was a strong Moby Dick flavor to the writing which just didn't help at all.

Someone else might be able to grok it better than I did, but I'm glad I got this one through the library.

later
Tom