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4.01 AVERAGE
4.01 AVERAGE
adventurous
challenging
dark
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I’ll probably read this in 50 years and still be blown away
adventurous
challenging
dark
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
challenging
dark
mysterious
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
An extremely unique book. I've not read any other stories from McCarthy and I found the writing style quite difficult to get used to but once you get past the first chapter it becomes easier.
The story is also a difficult read in every way you can imagine (and more), so is definitely not for the faint of heart. Although these topics are hard to read, I do feel that it is important that they are brought to life in order to show how cruel humans can be, no matter how uncomfortable that makes us.
The author's descriptive writing style is fascinating and it took me a couple of goes on certain pages to make sense.
The characters are in no way lovable and there is rarely any type of redemption.
Overall it's a bit of a depressing read, but expertly twined together.
The story is also a difficult read in every way you can imagine (and more), so is definitely not for the faint of heart. Although these topics are hard to read, I do feel that it is important that they are brought to life in order to show how cruel humans can be, no matter how uncomfortable that makes us.
The author's descriptive writing style is fascinating and it took me a couple of goes on certain pages to make sense.
The characters are in no way lovable and there is rarely any type of redemption.
Overall it's a bit of a depressing read, but expertly twined together.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal cruelty, Genocide, Racial slurs, Torture, Violence, Murder
Moderate: Animal death, Rape, Excrement
This book is violent. Crazy violent. So violent I became desensitized to it and started to zone out while reading and listening to it. I cannot express just how much horrific violence is contained within the pages of this book. I know it’s for a purpose. But damn.
I read this for a class I’m teaching on the American Southwest and this novel paints a heady portrait of the true violence involved in westward expansion. “How the west was won” is answered by McCarthy with “mind-numbing violence.” I appreciated McCarthy’s attempt at revisionist history and his stunning prose. I don’t know how much my students grasped. I don’t know how much I grasped. It’s not only a violent read but a difficult one. Nevertheless, I feel like this a more realistic portrait of the Wild West than any John Wayne film and I AM HERE FOR IT. We need to stop teaching the romanticized versions of American history and start teaching the truth. This book captures it.
And the judge is *shudders* so creepy.
I read this for a class I’m teaching on the American Southwest and this novel paints a heady portrait of the true violence involved in westward expansion. “How the west was won” is answered by McCarthy with “mind-numbing violence.” I appreciated McCarthy’s attempt at revisionist history and his stunning prose. I don’t know how much my students grasped. I don’t know how much I grasped. It’s not only a violent read but a difficult one. Nevertheless, I feel like this a more realistic portrait of the Wild West than any John Wayne film and I AM HERE FOR IT. We need to stop teaching the romanticized versions of American history and start teaching the truth. This book captures it.
And the judge is *shudders* so creepy.
adventurous
challenging
dark
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
challenging
dark
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
dark
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
N/A
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
See the ocotillo. See how it harangues the malpais bluffoned by a McCarthal wind as though some scribe of likewise and hitherto unliterable bemagining graced upon these parchments digital or physical the researched knowings etched within like sycophantic Greeks calling to the dryads whose spirits their long forsook trees once bore life and fruit drawn up from the roots once buried in sediment and salt and into the deepest surface fertilities of the initial crust before bedrock turns again to lava and cold turns again to heat.
Yes, they speak like this, he said, and every paragraph nay every sentence a carefully crafted diatribe penned once as if draughted up by fevered imaginings once forsworn in the thick of ill sleep. War is god but the battle is for the turning of the next page that might bequeath upon its storied travelers some world-weary respite cached among the inked letters a sentence to cling to or a meaning understood without need of a second glance or overtaxing of the frontal lobe because it makes more sense in the writing of such a thing than it does in the reading it back aloud and does it all mean anything at all? I presume it does and so indeed do many such meanings ascribed to the pages within do duly suggest and I am not one so jaded as to believe there is no such meaning in this nihilistic slaughter of life nor the genre parodied therein.
Yet even my most gracious givings find themselves failed in the suggested of leviness at whether every such synonym, soliloquy, or sidetrack held such necessity that it could not have been trimmed or cut down at all.
See the ocotillo. It dances and it dances and it says it will never die.
Is a novel lesser for the projected purpose it accrues if that purpose is to be picked apart at the seams in an english lesson classroom like some livestock of sacrifice out of an atavistic dream? I aint dare presume none. But it might be in the overseeking of meaning one becomes consumed with the blood-greed of the search and so it comes to pass for this literary wayfarer to become lost in their selfsame sauce. Or to put it in cruder terms the reader becomes so seduced by the context and hype and happenstance they beg to become high on their own supply.
The wayfarer will find no story within. Characters might be characters or they might be shadow puppets in a deific play, the point and purpose of which will be beknownst only to demiurgic beings of more cosmic fabrications. Here is a mirror within, dryad. Make of it what you will make of it.
Yes, they speak like this, he said, and every paragraph nay every sentence a carefully crafted diatribe penned once as if draughted up by fevered imaginings once forsworn in the thick of ill sleep. War is god but the battle is for the turning of the next page that might bequeath upon its storied travelers some world-weary respite cached among the inked letters a sentence to cling to or a meaning understood without need of a second glance or overtaxing of the frontal lobe because it makes more sense in the writing of such a thing than it does in the reading it back aloud and does it all mean anything at all? I presume it does and so indeed do many such meanings ascribed to the pages within do duly suggest and I am not one so jaded as to believe there is no such meaning in this nihilistic slaughter of life nor the genre parodied therein.
Yet even my most gracious givings find themselves failed in the suggested of leviness at whether every such synonym, soliloquy, or sidetrack held such necessity that it could not have been trimmed or cut down at all.
See the ocotillo. It dances and it dances and it says it will never die.
Is a novel lesser for the projected purpose it accrues if that purpose is to be picked apart at the seams in an english lesson classroom like some livestock of sacrifice out of an atavistic dream? I aint dare presume none. But it might be in the overseeking of meaning one becomes consumed with the blood-greed of the search and so it comes to pass for this literary wayfarer to become lost in their selfsame sauce. Or to put it in cruder terms the reader becomes so seduced by the context and hype and happenstance they beg to become high on their own supply.
The wayfarer will find no story within. Characters might be characters or they might be shadow puppets in a deific play, the point and purpose of which will be beknownst only to demiurgic beings of more cosmic fabrications. Here is a mirror within, dryad. Make of it what you will make of it.
challenging
dark
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
dark
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes