Desert Protocol - Atlas Shrugs

There's an xkcd that I've searched for on more than one occasion to no avail which has a bunch of generals planning D-Day and one of them keeps calling Godwins Law on the rest.
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Yesterday I finished The Road and really loved it. Riveting, once I became invested in the main characters' fate. The ending is just spectacularly moving. While Blood Meridian was haunting and epic, I couldn't see the point of so much unrelentless savagery. The Road has some of the same hopelessness, but this time all that acidity is balanced by tenderness. My only complaint is that McCarthy, every now and then, drops some amazingly obscure word that sticks out on the page because the rest of the vocabulary is so unassuming (though he uses everyday words in ways that are anything but).
 
i'll give The Road points for McCarthy's talent at taking me into a post-apocalypse world that is really frightening and all too easily imagined. i squirmed all the way thru that polluted black, gray claustrophobic world he forces us into day after day. i have more quibbles with the dialogues and storyline....the former felt weak at points, like someone was copying his style instead of he himself. the latter, well, it's been done before in various forms, so it lacked surprise for me. BM is a different kind of bleak, but for my taste it is much broader, deeper and fantastic. it can survive without much tenderness (partly because it's basically a period piece).....not so The Road. without the tenderness between the two characters, there is absolutely nothing left to pull one through the book. it is sort of like McCarthy's Omega man and certainly the biggest downer he's written, or so i think.
 
originally posted by Joel Stewart:
i'll give The Road points for McCarthy's talent at taking me into a post-apocalypse world that is really frightening and all too easily imagined. i squirmed all the way thru that polluted black, gray claustrophobic world he forces us into day after day. i have more quibbles with the dialogues and storyline....the former felt weak at points, like someone was copying his style instead of he himself. the latter, well, it's been done before in various forms, so it lacked surprise for me. BM is a different kind of bleak, but for my taste it is much broader, deeper and fantastic. it can survive without much tenderness (partly because it's basically a period piece).....not so The Road. without the tenderness between the two characters, there is absolutely nothing left to pull one through the book. it is sort of like McCarthy's Omega man and certainly the biggest downer he's written, or so i think.
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Interesting, for me it was almost the other way around. Maybe the fact of having a 9 year old daughter made the relationship poignant enough to counterbalance the bleakness just perfectly.
 
indeed, i was going to add too that half of any novel (or any wine, for that matter) is what we bring to it...i was/am in awe of his descriptive powers, but boy does he drag us through the muck in the road (and off the road) with nary a letup. he certainly seems at a different place than when he wrote BM....i mean can you imagine him writing anything more after The Road, now? (maybe a light comedy sketch?...hehe)

actually, it's been several years since i read blood meridian, but i concur...and can still recall my utter shock at how depraved a world it is that he depicts. (the western genre will never be the same for me now.) yet how strikingly well he depicts it, and he does it with a razor's edge vigor and vitality that in itself, in it's own strange way, is life affirming, no matter the content...at least that's how i took it...a writer, musician or painter at the peak of his/her powers always gets me...though i can see why you feel the way you do.
 
Blood Meridian made me, for the first time in my life, highly conscious of the scalp covering my skull, as well as its continuing presence...
 
Just finished Philip Roth's Indignation, terrific. For much of it he just purrs along, building the narrative, layering stories fluently and patiently. Then, with a master's sense of timing, he steps on the gas and the prose becomes a force of nature, as if the earlier control had just been a setup to make us easy pickings.
 
originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:
Yesterday I finished The Road and really loved it. Riveting, once I became invested in the main characters' fate. The ending is just spectacularly moving. While Blood Meridian was haunting and epic, I couldn't see the point of so much unrelentless savagery. The Road has some of the same hopelessness, but this time all that acidity is balanced by tenderness. My only complaint is that McCarthy, every now and then, drops some amazingly obscure word that sticks out on the page because the rest of the vocabulary is so unassuming (though he uses everyday words in ways that are anything but).
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I read The Road a couple of weekends ago. I also thought it was spectacular. There is no writer who is stylistically more suited to writing about a bleak post-apocalyptic vision, and I thought McCarthy pared down his tendency towards verbal obscura and arcana (well, you know what I mean) just enough. And, as you say, there is a perfect amount of leavening tenderness.

I couldn't make my way through Blood Meridian, either. I read an essay by Michael Chabon that described the novel as having extreme black comedy and horror elements in service of a novel that de-mythologizes the American westward expansion story, but to me it was, at the end of the day, just too much savagery.

I loved Suttree when I first read it. But it's a dense, odd wordfest; a world all its own.

And speaking of Chabon, if you haven't read The Final Solution, it's a novella worth seeking out. I very much enjoy Chabon's embrace of "genre fiction." His sensibility doesn't divide the world of reading into the important and unimportant. Chabon strikes me as a writer who is generally thought of as "serious" but hasn't forgotten that reading should be fun.
 
originally posted by VLM:

I think that White Noise is DeLillo's high point. I can't get through Underworld or Mao II. I don't know why.
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I thought Underworld was wonderful. Especially the opening scene.

For me great books are like great movies, you remember the enjoyment you experienced and where you were when you read the book or watched the movie. For Underworld, it was laying in a hammock on vacation for two days and refusing to leave the house for lunch or dinner until I finished the book.
 
Interesting comment re: Chabon. I just finished Yiddish Policemen's Union. While it's a fun, stylish read, it lacks substance, as all of his work seems to. He appears to be our Martin Amis, so much talent and so little to write about, yet entertaining nonetheless. Pity.
 
originally posted by Bwood: For me great books are like great movies, you remember the enjoyment you experienced and where you were when you read the book or watched the movie...
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Or heard the music.
 
originally posted by Scott Kraft:
Interesting comment re: Chabon. I just finished Yiddish Policemen's Union. While it's a fun, stylish read, it lacks substance, as all of his work seems to. He appears to be our Martin Amis, so much talent and so little to write about, yet entertaining nonetheless. Pity.
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I agree with respect to Martin Amis, entertaining. Chabon seems slightly different to me. Or maybe sometimes entertaining is enough. I am fine enjoying books that won't make the iSlate Modern Library 21st Century Top 100 list.

But then, to me, the more recent Pynchon and David Foster Wallace seem all too substantial and important.
 
Mason & Dixon provides an interesting counterpoint to Blood Meridian. They both deal with similiar themes regarding early American mythmaking but M&D is informed more by regret and melancholy rather than revulsion. Pynchon is also able to turn a knowing eye on the modern day effects of westward expansion better than McCarthy, but that sort of thing is his trade. I will say that wading through the scalps for McCarthy's language is worth it in the end.
 
Though hijacked, I found this a great thread. Am now (still) in the beginning of The Recognitions. Seems fucking awesome so far, though not a quick read. Still no Pynchon read, but Lot49 is in the post.
 
originally posted by Cory Cartwright:
Mason & Dixon provides an interesting counterpoint to Blood Meridian. They both deal with similiar themes regarding early American mythmaking but M&D is informed more by regret and melancholy rather than revulsion. Pynchon is also able to turn a knowing eye on the modern day effects of westward expansion better than McCarthy, but that sort of thing is his trade. I will say that wading through the scalps for McCarthy's language is worth it in the end.
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I've been telling myself I need to wade through the pools of blood to give it another try. That's the sort of encouragement I need.
 
originally posted by Scott Kraft:
Interesting comment re: Chabon. I just finished Yiddish Policemen's Union. While it's a fun, stylish read, it lacks substance, as all of his work seems to. He appears to be our Martin Amis, so much talent and so little to write about, yet entertaining nonetheless. Pity.
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See, I really like Martin Amis, but I guess I would. For whatever reason, it just speaks to me. Maybe clever is enough. I really might be that shallow. I'm gonna check out Chabon.

I'm staring at Gravity's Rainbow and wondering whether now is the time to give it another shot...

I guess I need to have another go at McCarthy as well.

I did not renew my Economist, Atlantic (because it sucks) or Foreign Affairs subscriptions. I need to start reading again and I won't if I have all that stuff around me all the time.

Anyone else here a Mishima fan?
 
originally posted by VLM:I'm staring at Gravity's Rainbow and wondering whether now is the time to give it another shot...
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Ditto, just picked it up from the shelf today. Scared. But maybe I've grown up since last time I tried, and failed.
 
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