Blood Meridian

I can recognise the greatness but I didn't enjoy it. It was a slow, extremely painful read.

The author's legendary aversion to commas imposes a certain tempo, and most sentences require at least two run-throughs before the syntax falls together correctly.

At the same time though, many of those sentences were so wonderful that I re-read them over and over; some of them I must have read dozens of times. This has never happened to me before on a scale quite like this.

There are so many images in Blood Meridian that are absolutely horrific and that induce compassion fatigue and nightmares and that deter from picking up the book again for days. I almost gave it up after the snakebitten horse, and that was nothing compared to what was coming.

I don't know if I can recommend this to anyone; it's hard to handle all this lyrical beauty when it wraps so much extreme violence.

One to come back to when I'm older, wiser and more cynical.