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Just finished Outer Dark by McCarthy. I've been reading through all of his novels the past two months and its probably the most grim one out of them, outside of The Road. You can see some forming of the stylistic threads that would mark Blood Meridian or No Country for Old Men, and in all honesty, I consider the three strangers that are in the wings for most of the book to be some of the most sinister of McCarthy's villains. The ferry ride in the darkness, and the scene of the three of them and Culla sitting around the fire was one of the most hair-raising sequences in any of McCarthy's books that I've read yet. It honestly beat out anything involving Chigurh or Judge Holden. I was planning on continuing on and reading the Border Crossing trilogy, but might hold off on it until I've let this book stew a bit more. There's definitely a lot of symbolism that I missed when I was blazing through the last 100 pages of the book, and so I've been looking up some analyses of it to get a better feel for what I may have missed.
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Apr 13, 2021 19:34
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| # ¿ Apr 24, 2024 04:03 |
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Finished this 2022 translation of a 2015 Romanian book called Solenoid, and honestly somewhat frustrated at not getting it. I saw that the book had praise heaped upon it in a lot of publications for being a synthesis of Borges's and Kafka's themes, but the entire time I was reading it, I was just questioning if and when a semblance of a plot would develop. So much potential with things that were introduced that went virtually nowhere. Ultimately, the ending left me very jaded, and while the book was very well written/translated poetically, I still feel like all the praise I saw of it being "the greatest novel of the 21st century so far" was overblown. I also finished another book I had withdrawn from the library titled When Crack Was King about the titular rise of crack cocaine as a street drug and its effects upon communities and people. It was interesting reading the two accounts of the former Baltimore mayor and a Newark drug dealer's lives during the crack era, but I felt it could have used something more. The other two people whose lives the book focused on got comparatively little attention compared to the first two, and I felt that it could have been shored up a little better in that aspect by drawing on more accounts. As to reading habits, I try to hit about 100 pages a day in whatever I'm reading. This regularly means 1-2 hours of reading during the weekdays and a lot longer when allowed for the weekends, but the form that this takes can vary. I typically will read in large chunks, take a break with something that doesn't involve reading or staring at a screen, and do some lighter reading if I still feel the itch to do so (poetry, short stories, etc.) after wrapping up my main reading target for the day.
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Sep 5, 2023 04:47
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