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Crazyweasel posted:I picked up Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy a few months ago and it has been quite the struggle. I'm reading Blood Meridian right now and it doesn't start picking up until slightly over halfway through. There are some good plot twists that happen in the first half, but McCarthy spends an unbelievable amount of time describing the environment and traveling. I keep a vocab notebook to jot down definitions of words I don't know when I read, and five solid pages back-to-back are from Blood Meridian. It's getting really good, though. The only book I've tried to read recently that I completely gave up on is House of Leaves because it's pointless, boring and not scary at all. If you look at Pale Fire by Nabokov it does basically the same thing House of Leaves tries to achieve on an intellectual level except it's much shorter, entertaining, well-written, rewards the effort you put into it, and doesn't rely on artsy layout bullshit. Actually, I don't think House of Leaves counts for this thread, because I have absolutely no desire to finish it and don't feel it has any literary merit, so on that note: Never finished Gravity's Rainbow (hell, barely got into it) but I still want to tackle it eventually, even though I hated it right off the bat. I have a hard time getting into Pynchon's style due to its density and overall weirdness. I did read The Crying of Lot 49 in school (which I didn't exactly enjoy but found interesting), but the sprawling nature of his books is a major turn-off for me. He's like Joyce - I understand he's a great writer, but it doesn't do anything for me as a reader.
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May 11, 2008 08:15
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Personally I didn't find the Navidson Record scary, and the Johnny Truant sections were really annoying due to the run-on sentences. The Whalestoe Letters were kind of interesting but a small part of the book. I count Borges and Nabokov as two of my favorite authors, and House of Leaves reads like a pale echo of their style with none of the depth and a heavy reliance on gimmicky structure.quote:But people on Something Awful love to let as many people as possible know that they're brilliant literary detectives--in their majority, they dislike House of Leaves because they can tell that the author is "smug," and "self-satisfied," and he must have thought he was "being incredibly clever" (of course, these readers can immediately tell that although he thinks he's being clever, he's really not). Look, just because I dislike a book or anything else in general doesn't mean I look down on people who do, and I personally never said or even implied any of this so please don't put words into my mouth. I know you didn't single me out in particular but I'm definitely in your audience. Also, House of Leaves is in the "Hall of Fame" thread so it obviously has some sort of following on this board. You're entitled to your opinion, just like everybody else here.
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May 12, 2008 02:05
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Foppish posted:Blood Meridian, The Road, and No Country For Old Men really aren't that difficult. Can't speak for anyone else, but Blood Meridian was too slow to be enjoyable. It's well written, the ideas in it are interesting, and (from what I've read) a tremendous amount of research went into it, but the main character is the environment and that can get tiring after a few hundred pages. The Road was slow too, but the father and son dynamic was the main focus, and No Country moved at a really brisk pace until the last 30 or so pages (which were still really good). Blood Meridian isn't difficult per se, but it takes so long to get off the ground and it's so clinical I can't blame anyone for giving up on it. My contribution is Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. I'm not a particularly visual reader, so page after page of description really didn't jell with me, even though it's supposed to be fantastic once you get into it.
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Oct 31, 2008 15:20
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