>it's good because it's hard to read
>>25221365>it's hard to readif you're profoundly retarded, sure
>>25221365It’s okay because it’s decently written. I wish people here would agree there instead of sucking corn’s cob pretending he’s better than Shakespeare. I also wish there wasn’t a bunch of malding braindead zoomers calling it reddit.
>>25221373Soillennials are the ones who seethe at corncob here.
>>25221365Yeah it has a David Lynch quality where it's murky and confusing on purpose but there's really no point to telling the story that way. Performative aesthetics.
>inb4 pseudfags come in pretending like they even understood anything in this pointlessly difficult book
>>25221365>>25221389Yeah there are some parts that I had some difficult reading. I am not even talking about when the author use old words. Sometimes I had to check a chapter summary so that I was certain that I understood what I had read.>inb4 eslYeah you are right, but I read the original text along the translated version, even then the strange prose made it difficult.
>>25221389No one really gets what the Judge is going on about but you can at least understand the narrative events happening in the book, even if not their symbolism/allusion/significance etc.
>>25221365McCarthy overuses his thesaurus, choosing whack words to appear better than he is
>>25221365Is it worth it to stop and look up all the weird words?
Do you think he was able to come up with shit like "mare imbrium" off the top of the dome or he goes out and looks up obscure words to describe things?
Shallow, hiding behind a stylistic gimmick because it doesn't have anything to say that would be interesting to anybody with any sort of knowledge of the world at all. Not bad though. Might be good for an adult midwit whose never had a philosophical thought before, or for a precocious adolescent.
>>25221601Stop saying mean things about my cowboy adventure dime novel
>>25221601>>25221602Goddamn! The insecurity reeking from these posts>>25221569It's said that his memory was very good.
>>25221602It's OK to like it! Just don't be weird about it.
>>25221569It's pretty clear that McCarthy does extensive research for his books, and he keeps his sources secret. We know he used My Confession for Blood Meridian, and I bet he used a bunch of archaic gnostic texts as well for inspiration. It's likely a lot of his vocabulary words were coming from those sources. I doubt he was using a thesaurus, as a lot of the archaic words he uses arent in thesauruses.
>>25221603I sorta liked the book actually, what, making a frivolous observation about it is insecure?
>>25221365ah, blood meridian, monsieur? that novel is the sark and chaparral of literature, the filament whereon rode the remuda of highbrow, corraled out of some destitute hacienda upon the arroya, quirting and splurting with main and with pyrolatrous coagulate of lobated grandiloquence. our eyes rode over the pages, monsieur, of that slatribed azotea like argonauts of suttee, juzgados of swole, bights and systoles of walleyed and tyrolean and carbolic and tectite and scurvid and querent and creosote and scapular malpais and shellalagh. we scalped, monsieur, the gantlet of its esker and led our naked bodies into the rebozos of its mennonite and siliceous fauna, wallowing in the jasper and the carnelian like archimandrites, teamsters, combers of cassinette scoria, centroids of holothurian chancre, with pizzles of enfiladed indigo panic grass in the saltbush of our vigas, true commodores of the written page, rebuses, monsieur, we were the mygale spiders too and the devonian and debouched pulque that settled on the frizzen studebakers, listening the wolves howling in the desert while we saw the judge rise out of a thicket of corbelled arches, whinstone, cairn, cholla, lemurs, femurs, leantos, moonblanched nacre, uncottered fistulas of groaning osnaburg and kelp, isomers of fluepipe and halms awap of griddle, guisado, pelancillo.
>>25221618Haven’t seen this one in a while. It’s really starting to seem there are only a few people here left who were also here prior to 2020.
>>25221365I read the italian translation and this fucking nigger Raul Montanari made it more difficult than the original ffs. Literally, I recently started reading the original and it's way easier to grasp. At least the first chapters, I remember it getting harder as it goes on and they're riding around.
>>25221701The difficulty only starts around chapter 4. Little me was breezing through the early chapters but then i got to chapter 4 and had to quit.
>>25221711Yeah, thought so. However, for an ESL is ludicrous how certain translations from english are way harder than just fucking reading the og, this happens often.
>>25221701>>25221716It may be more difficult because Blood Meridian has a Biblical cadence, McCarthy took heavily from KJV. A translator wanting to convey the same feeling may need to change the style drastically.
>>25221365>write a purposefully violent book>it attracts male readers who have the linguistic breadth of a fly and haven't had the urge to read beforewhat did Cormac mean by this? I feel like this is a more profound statement than the book itself.
>>25221365The black reared his head at the sight of the lubricious form of the judge's pale phallus serpentine it wandered gazing out into the world as an infant unborn and yet undesired brought into the world cold and pale and unbreathing. Its pillaric form shone brightly in the void the pillar stood mute upon the black promontory a monolith wrought in obscene geometry. The Judge took to a foul chimeric cacophany of grunting as his member penetrated serene the fistula of the niggers anus dark and unmoving in that sea of serpentine parades the Judge set to stirring up the very soul and the thrice uncottered dreams of the buck were fetched as if a pulque upon the sunborn indigo infant of the world yet unawakened in this land or any other. His breaking came forth as if unbidden into that old night the shadows long and gristled as each thrust was delivered ungouged and unrequited it's eldritch desire can be found buried deep within the hearts of men. As some titan cherubim this pale form let out a cry in the tongues not of man or beast but like to an infernal register unheard in this world since that brought forth tears from the eyes of the watchers and were rendered as stars that danced like naked pygmies upon the bastion of Babylon.The watchers members taken also in hand at their opportunity to arrive unbidden into the bastion of that forsaken womb to bring forth not a child of god but a buck rendered broken upon the firmament which would render the dreams of that infernal race delivered asunder unto the world, writhing and unformed but yet natural in the land that conjured it.
>>25221722KJV is one of the most translated works of all time and was written for mass consumption. McCarthy raises the difficulty level by a 100.
>>25221771That's not my point, anon. McCarthy hearkens back to the language of KJV, and if a translator wants to achieve a similar effect, they should refer to a similar text in the language they're translating to. For instance, a Polish translator should imitate the language used in Jakub Wujek's Bible translation. An Italian translator would imitate the language in the first/most influential translation of the Bible into Italian.
>>25221365It’s good because it’s interesting.
>it’s bad because I struggle with basic ass fictiongo back to Austen
>hard to readAmerigoycattle really had a number done on their education system, huh? I'm glad they have to deal in the real world.
>>25221365This shit was the biggest disappointment. By the time I realized I hated this book I was already 150 pages in and I decided to finish it. Honestly could have dropped it and not missed out on anything. My eyes would glaze over reading his dumb ass sprawling sentences to the point that I just started skimming the 80% of this book where McCarthy is just describing a fucking desert. When things are actually happening, it's really fun to read. The last quarter of this book and the sparse moments in between the characters are actually doing something are great, but then it just turns right back into "le desert is le dry and there are le bones and they are like (insert archaic biblical descriptor) on le dusty plane and there are le mountains"
>>25221995Genuinely filtered.
>>25221995damn, what's it like to get that filtered?
>>25221365It's English. There is nothing good in English, so they have to larp.
McCarthy isn't hard to read. if you have any experience reading literature written before the 1950s then it'll be easy. but mccarthyfags are midwit manchildren who only read genre fic fantasy before reading blood meridian so of course they'll pretend it's some kind of obscure difficult work
>>25222019>Seething brownoid can’t into the best language
>>25221995I thought it was grotesque, but he's such a gifted and compelling writer that I couldn't stop. A real page turner.
it's not that hard to read.
He’s decent sure but there wasn’t much competition in his time (and even less now). I think had he been 50 years older he’d still be considered remarkable, but not an all time great.
>>25221365>Hard to read Ermmmm.... excuse me but the audiobook is the definitive way to experience this.
>>25221618and they rode on
>>25221365>hardyeah if you're retarded
>>25222064>*the kid spat* >*glanton spat*
>>25221995imagine getting filtered by the book equivalent of red dead redemption (the first one)
>>25222119Fun game that was, did the developers like John Marston’s plays enough to name their protagonist after him? I doubt it, he’s pretty underrated, but not on par with other jacobeans. but I like Marston and that’s what got me to play it.
>>25222021Rich coming from an ESL retard like you who didn't even know that the Faerie queen is a poem.
>>25221365Faulkner's Sound and the Fury is hard to read. Blood Meridian is not.
>>25222050>zoomer unironically nostagiafagging for literatureHoly fuck, there needs to be a ban on redditors
Uh oh… here we go again
>>25222200>>25222196Why are you so upset? Don’t like it when your reddit book gets shat on?
>>25222198Fake difficulty. If you have to rely on cutting up the story in a million little pieces and then scattering them, then you're just artificially removing context to make it difficult for the reader. Real difficulty is like Oxen of the sun, or like late Henry James, where comprehending what's written itself is hard.
>>25222206Maybe you should go back to your precious preddit, ESL retard
>>25222211>>25222206it's a bonified memewar. say reddit and ESL more guys. maybe throw in a volley of be me greentexts next.
Every Cormac thread ends up like this. You’re all fucking stupid and you don’t even realise it, god I hate this shitty board.
>>25222232At this point it feels like /v/ has higher quality literature discussion than /lit/
>>25221365I read it and liked it, the prose was great, I heard the meme that it was hard to read before I read it and I can only say those people are retarded.
McCarthy glazers WILL be mocked and shamed off this board.
>>25222245The best discussions are always off the boards dedicated to the topic.
>>25222245Likewise for video game discussion on /lit/.
>>25222430I brought up Tim Buckley in that Bob Dylan thread (I don’t even like Dylan but I was curious about what /lit/ thought of him these days) a couple weeks ago and it’s probably the best music discussion I’ve ever had on this site. /mu/ is purportedly awful these days, not that it was ever that great to begin with.
>>25222436Every time I've gone on /mu/ half the catalog was populated with kpop generals, and the rest of the board was either too slow to discuss anything before it got buried, or the kind of bait/shitflinging "discussion" that gets fast replies./v/ and /lit/ are both much worse than they were even a few years ago.
>>25221749>what did Cormac mean by this?He is a great favorite, the Judge.
>>25222208>artificially removing contextArtificial argument.
>>25222386Go get 'em champ
>>25221365Seethe anon. He is pale and thin he wears a thin and ragged Evangelion shirt. He stokes his penis. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags effay and darker 7-11s beyond that harbor yet a few last tendies. His folk are known for jerkers of cock and drinkers of cum but in truth his father has been dissatisfied with him. He lies in monster energy he quotes from boards whose names are now lost. The anon crouches by the computer and watches him.Night of your birth. Thirty-three. Dubs. The autist they were called. Shaka how the wall did fall. I looked for BCC holes in the heavens. The nigger stove.The mother dead raped by pakis did incubate in her own bosom the creature who would carry her off. The father never pays his bills the anon is NEET. He has a sister in this world that looks down at him like he is garbage. He watches pale and unwashed. He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless politics. All shitpost present in that visage the anon the father of the bant.
>>25222724Was pretty good pasta until the cringe Star Trek reference.
It's hard to read insofar as it describes kids being tortured and women being raped, but aside from that, it's just edgeslop. It's a Garth Ennis comic in literary form.
>>25222733Holden his arms wide
Watching /lit/ turn against corncob in the exact proportion that normalfags embrace him has been funny as fuck.
>>25222739Nobody's turning on anything we've always had schizo anti McCarthy posters here
>>25221567you didn't learn this word in high school? it's worth it to look up the weird obscure references to planets and shit, but we have standards here anon c'mon
>>25221373Shakespeare sucks ass. Middle age white woman catnip that the English teachers can't stop huffing. Hell most modern day authors are leagues ahead of him.
>>25221749I love that because Blood Meridian became a normie book after the Wendigoon video. People now speak of Blood Meridian in the same breath as the Cosmere.
>>25222739Im sure it's because more people on here ACTUALLY read it after its big boom. So before that it was all just performative praise in the typical /lit/ fashion. Mind you most threads before it's boom in popularity were just "WhAT iS hE tHe jUdGe oF?"
>>25223005You’ve never read Shakespeare so your opinion is pretty pointless
>>25223018niggie it's just a fun book
>>25223027Blood Meridian... Fun? Even Moby-Dick is more fun by miles.
>>25221365>it's hard to read
>>25223044If you don't like it you don't have to make threads about it
>>25223014new storm is brewing.
>>25223073Looking forward to its anime adaptation, video game tie in and Fortnite crossover
>>25221373So basically you're saying you wish people were honest and genuine instead of saying and believing things for egotistical or social reasons.>>25221386How do you know that?
>>25223073Give it a week and the algorithm will have moved on
>>25223073lmao kino
>>25221365I read this book wile high for the only time in my life and hated it
>>25221365Its basically grimdark in a western setting. Its a very cool book especially if you're an autistic young male but also yeah of course its way overrated.
I'm mostly amazed that Corncob could write such memorable prose, while still producing a book that even made edgy grimdark ultraviolence feel boring.
>>25223092Something like that, I guess it’s nearly impossible to find that here on /lit/ in 2026 so I’m the fool.
>>25221365I know this is probably bait but is this book really considered hard to read by the masses?
>>25224197Yes
>>25224200I'm guessing it's people who don't read frequently and pick up the book because of its popularity.
>>25224197People call dune hard to read, take away their punctuation and they go insane.
>>25224222Spot on. You see it’s exponential growth in popularity amongst younger non readers who see the judge as a sort of “ultimate evil supervillain” comparable to their favourite anime edgelord, and this is cool because he has no moral limits, kill mexican and doesn’t afraid of anything. Then they read the book and get filtered by cormac’s sometimes archaic style that doesn’t take that long to get used to, and the fact that the violence and abhorrence is actually quite scarce. Nice trips btw.
>>25224197It's probably harder to read if you're unfamiliar with the American West and antebellum US history.
>>25224222It uses a lot of archaic words not to mention the technical errors...
>>25221365It’s not hard to read. It reads like a screenplay.
>>25224400Are you retarded?
>>25224197The passages I've seen posted (usually to "prove" how good McCarthy is) feel very dense, but I assume they make sense in context.
>>25224425McCarthy keeps switching between high and low. Whether you consider him difficult depends on whether you hyperfocus on the high parts, or if your eyes just glaze over to continue the narrative. I see the same tendency with Moby-Dick; those who read slowly, who seek to understand every sentence and reference will find the book challenging, while the others will breeze through it.
>>25224472I had the opposite experience. If you're reading him for the first time it is impossible to read the prose quickly because the syntax is very chaotic and jumps from subject to subject at the drop of a hat, and the diction is dense and unusual. Imagine Joyce or Faulkner writing in stream of consciousness but also making the conscious effort to sound as inhuman as possible. On the other hand, it's this juxtaposition that makes it unique, and a pleasure to read.
>>25221995the moment where the ex-preist warns the kid that sympathetically volunteering to remove the arrow from david's leg was foolish since he'd likely kill him if he messed it up was what sold me. it's very applicable to real life, if you help people out of goodness, all of the sudden you have expectation placed upon you. some of the book resonates with the brutal realities of life and that is why people like it so much.
He'd taken up a pallet between Toadvine and another Ken-tuckian, a veteran of the war. This man had returned to claim some darkeyed love he'd left behind two years before when Doniphan's command pulled east for Saltillo and the officers had had to drive back hundreds of young girls dressed as boys that took the road behind the army. Now he would stand in the street solitary in his chains and strangely unassuming, gazing out across the tops of the heads of the townspeople, and at night he'd tell them of his years in the west, an amiable warrior, a reticent man. He'd been at Mier where they fought until the draintiles and the gutters and the spouts from the azoteas ran with blood by the gallon and he told them how the brittle old Spanish bells would explode when hit and how he sat against a wall with his shattered leg stretched out on the cobbles before him listening to a lull in the firing that grew into a strange silence and in this silence there grew a low rumbling that he took for thunder until a cannonball came around the corner trundling over the stones like a wayward bowl and went past and down the street and disappeared from sight. He told how they'd taken the city of Chihuahua, an army of irregulars that fought in rags and underwear and how the cannonballs were solid copper and came loping through the grass like runaway suns and even the horses learned to sidestep or straddle them and how the dames of the city rode up into the hills in buggies and picnicked and watched the battle and how at night as they sat by the fires they could hear the moans of the dying out on the plain and see by its lantern the deadcart moving among them like a hearse from limbo.
>I refuse to read books that are challenging
>>25224569Challenging books are fun. I get the same kick out of Pynchon as I do out of shmups and dungeon crawlers.
>>25224552I still can't tell how full of shit Granney Rat was.All his stories about the war are Grandiose, but tells them humbly. He only shows his color when he abandons the gang with their horse and supplies.
>>25224501>Imagine Joyce or Faulkner writing in stream of consciousness but also making the conscious effort to sound as inhuman as possible
Prolapsed and waterstained ceiling, the sagging coffers. He turned, a vain figure in the ruins. Blind parget cherubs watched from the high corners. Hello, he called. A voice that went from room to room and back again.Gods and fathers what has happened here, good friends where is there clemency?One spring morning timing the lean near-liquid progress of a horse on a track, the dust exploding, the rapid hasping of his hocks, coming up the straight foreshortened and awobble and passing elongate and birdlike with harsh breath and slatted brisket heaving and the muscles sliding and bunching in clocklike flexion under the wet black hide, the aging magistrate snapped his thumb from the keep of the stopwatch he held and palmed it into his waistcoat pocket and looking at nothing, nor child nor horse, said anent that simple comparison of rotary motions and in the oratory to which he was prone that they had witnessed a thing against which time would not prevail.He meant a thing to be remembered, but the young apostate by the rail at his elbow had already begun to sicken at the slow seeping of life. He could see the shape of the skull through the old man’s flesh. Hear sand in the glass. Lives running out like something foul, night-soil from a cesspipe, a measured dripping in the dark. The clock has run, the horse has run, and which has measured which?He moved along the hall toward the dining room. Paint on these old paneled doors crazed and yellowed like old porcelain. Something more than time has passed here. In this banquet hall. Scene of old heraldic feasts. Suttree in silent recognition of the somewhat illustrious dead. Large companies seated. A fat marcassin to adorn the board. The male bonecoupling rearing white and steaming up from the broken meat. Eyes watch. A malediction for those belated on the road and now commence. Mad trenchermen in armed sortees above the platters, the clang of steel, the stained and dripping chops, the eyes sidling. Yard dogs and starving palliards contest the scraps among the straw. There is nothing laid to table save meat and water. There is no sound of human speech. Beyond the muted clamor at the board there is a faint echo of another chase. Far hue and cry and distant horns and hounds in pain with eagerness. The master of the table has looked up. Down murrey fields another hunt has cried the stag. The master wipes his fingers in his hair and his rising says that the feast is done. Outside darkness has begun and the hounds’ voices are chimes in the distance that toll seven and cease. They wait for the waterbearer to come but he does not come, and does not come.Suttree went out through the kitchen and through the ruined garden to the old road. Reprobate scion of doomed Saxon clans, out of a rainy day dream surmised. Old paint on an old sign said dimly to keep out. Someone must have turned it around because it posted the outer world. He went on anyway. He said that he was only passing through.
