Blood Ass Meridian

Oh my sweet lord Christ in heaven on a cow with a kitten on it.

I did it.

I finally freaking did it.

I finished reading Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy.

And I hated every second of it.

Someone I know sort of, recommends it all over the place, every time the subject of books comes up, this fellow (who is hilarious and very intelligent) tells everyone to read this book. Best book ever written. Above all other books.

Bah.

BAH I SAY!

This was one of the most painful reads I’ve had in a long time. But I had to finish it, because I hated it so freaking much.

This is the anti-Fountainhead in terms of how I feel about books.

I understand the lyrical prose, I understand the horror of the west in the 1840’s, I understand the violence and bloodshed (which didn’t bother me; they were the only parts I actually pricked up a bit).

What I don’t understand, is an ass sentence like the one below that takes me 18,000 times to read it, and then I still don’t understand it. Keep in mind, the sentence is written exactly as it is in the book, I have neither added nor taken away commas or other grammatical aides:

“On the plain, behind him are the wanderers in search of bones and those who do not search and they move haltingly in the light like mechanisms whose movements are monitored with escapement and pallet so that they appear restrained by a prudence or reflectiveness which has no inner reality and they cross in their progress one by one that track of holes that runs to the rim of the visible ground and which seems less the pursuit of some continuance than the verification of a principle, a validation of sequence and causality as if each round and perfect hole owed its existence to the one before it there on that prairie upon which are the bones and the gatherers of bones and those who do not gather.

WHAT?? Are you stinking kidding me? Okay, maybe it’s fucking brilliant. But its not, because I can’t read it. I’ve read the sentence a million times and it still makes no sense and I give up halfway through.

THE WHOLE BOOK IS LIKE THIS.

I don’t know what I’m reading next, but it’s going to be like a children’s book.

This ass is ridiculous.