vadersolstavlan 's review for:

Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy

5.0

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it was about 10 minutes before we had to go watch oppenheimer that this book caught my eye on the library shelf and since i'd always wanted to try reading one of mccarthy's books i decided to borrow it without looking much at the back cover or anything. i've always liked constellation imagery, so the title stood out to me as well. this one in the library was the one with the crayon-blue cover, but i couldn't finish it in time and had to return it. at some point i'd put so many bookmarks intending to write down the quotes or read up on the items i couldn't read the physical copy comfortably, anyway. i borrowed the ebook, which had a different cover--the one with a person on it, in water. the subject was so coincidental that it was almost spooky, but anyway. on to the book.

i normally hate books with no quotation marks, no speech attributions...but this was fine? i did take a while to find my bearings sometimes, mostly when i'd taken a break from the book. the whole thing is written as conversations between alicia and her psychiatrist, like a play, without anything but the dialogue. it's a fantastic book that felt like it was written for me. in a way, it's most similar to 'when we cease to understand the world', but reads..more intelligently, in the way it discusses life and death, which i suppose is the only important thing. if there is any important thing. i liked a lot of the quotes, like "your life is set upon you like a dog". because alicia was a mathematician there's a lot of that (i mean, math papers. talking about theories and papers), but not for math, and not for physics, and not just for new mexico. it's about life and death. 

i had to start a document to write down all the things that were raised. okay, wittgenstein. kraft-ebbing. godel. but it wasn't like they were namedropped, it just reads how people who know those things discuss it. i am not one of those people. though i guess that's the biggest reason why this book took me so long to read, since i often put down the book to read about the tractatus, though it's not really necessary to be knowing about all that while you're reading. i'm just easily distracted. 

there was a playlist i listened to while reading this, but i took a lot of time to read this and of course my distracted reading up on the concepts. at around the 25% mark i finally gave up reading up on things every time something cropped up and put it into the document as succinctly as i could and i finished the rest of it...basically yesterday. it's a bit jarring now that i think about it, but i was listening to cool with you by newjeans on repeat for it.