Wantok

Stopping after 100 pages, think this will be my last Murakami. Gotta give credit to Hardboiled Wonderland and Wild Sheep Chase, but so far this is kind of a continuation of his earlier stuff blended with narrative structures found in Wonderland and mixed with the ethos of later works like Norwegian Wood. 100 pages in and I think I'm just tired of thin and utilitarian writing for female characters as has been a theme in his works as well as a tiring plot structure. Cool techniques so far here, but I'm gonna tap out.

Dang... O'Connor has become one of my absolute all time favorite writers... Her writing is stunning, so much anger constantly pushing against itself, her characters both extremely alienating yet hypnotizing. Absolutely unforgettable moments and images, I don't think I will ever escape Hazel's flagellant marching or Tarwater's rubble revelation.

A tormenting novel, a moral apocalypse. Simply arresting, and its hard to say why, O'Connor's hell is different from any I've seen before... Perhaps because while other hells in literature have a defined Satan there is none in Wise Blood, simply the illiterate and hateful clawing at each other. Such cruelty and evil, and yet Jesus' name is not missing from a single chapter, the destruction of morality would not be complete without the knowledge that somewhere someone is grieving it, and that shadow hangs heavy over this book.

Interesting premise and world but the prose proved to be tedious and unenjoyable overall for me.

A complete, punch for punch magnum opus. Nabokov weaves the imaginative romantic images of Lolita into the evasive word games of Pale Fire and creates an incredible journey. His writing style always arrests me with it's effortless yet acrobatic syntax and rhythm but this reaches a new level. Truly one of the most significant works of literature in the english language, it is one of the most intimate depictions of love and inspires a realistic and revelational vision of age and time. I can't think of many other experiences that have both given me new insights into the nature of love, while at the same time making me realistically contemplate the end of my life. A book to be studied and reread for decades.

Absolutely incredible. A novel that I think is likely more potent now, in an age where depictions of violence are more common place than ever before, than it was when it first came out. To me that's one interesting part of reading about reactions to the book when it first came out up until the early 2000s even, the general feeling that it's too violent. If anyone has kept up with television in the past 10 years (Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad), I'd say they could handle Blood Meridian. There are still scenes in the book that will make you shudder, which I think is a bigger testament to this being written in 85 and McCarthy's foreknowledge of the continued evolution of America's obsession with brutality.
The book is of course so much more than the violence McCarthy depicts. To me it's the most brutally realistic vision of the romanticized West I've ever encountered. There are no heroes, moral codes belong to each man's interpretation of his place in the universe, it is not a land of inviting sunsets and enchanting adventure but brimstone and chaos.
And yet amid this intense realism McCarthy blends in the fantastic, the nephilim Judge Holden, pulsating depictions of the desert and seemingly surreal moments the kid experiences. Characters that feel as though they're summations of western archetypes (the protagonist as the epitome of the wanderer without a name, the expriest now ironically turned cutthroat, the crazed bandit leader), this is the balancing act McCarthy walks, he sets before us these concepts or archetypes we've become familiar with in the western canon and subverts them by making them abundantly realistic. These assumptions of character we take as larger than life are presented as no more than gravely flawed and tormented human beings.
This makes for perhaps the most engaging literary experience I've ever had, I've never felt a book so effortlessly flow off the page before yet McCarthy has a rhythm, diction, syntax and verve that makes this addictively entertaining from the first chapter to the epilogue.