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Oct 22, 2011

Josh rated it:

Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is unquestionably the most violent novel I’ve ever read. It’s also one of the best.

For those who would consider that a turn-off, I offer this caveat:
For the overwhelming majority of fiction that involves a lot of violence, the violence itself is an act of masturbation representing either the author’s dark impulse or, perhaps worse, pandering to the reader’s similar revenge fantasies (this might explain why the majority of Blood Meridian fans I More...

18 comments like (73 people liked it)

Mar 20, 2011

Nick rated it:

the last thing i read in 2009, and the best fiction i'd read since Infinite Jest in 2007. all through early new years day, i gabbled at any number of people about how this book had, for a short and beautiful period, changed my life. i thanked rob for recommending it. as the night went on, i spoke of judge holden less, instead assuming his persona (and o! judge holden surely is one of the great creations of all American literature -- the kind of guy you want to read and reread, maybe type out lon More...

9 comments like (23 people liked it)

Oct 06, 2010

Michael rated it:

*Updated, now with an additional McCarthyized section of the Bible, moved up from the comment section.*

Here's what I'm thinkin.

THE CORMAC MCCARTHY PROJECT

Ever since reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, I've been considering the possibilities of revisiting the classics and, um, reinterpreting them. Butchering? Yes, you're probably right. Butchering them. That's the right word.

Anyway, since Cormac McCarthy has the most distinctive and power More...

33 comments like (47 people liked it)

Feb 01, 2012

Karen rated it:

This is Jane Austen antimatter.
I was trying to convey how this was so different to anything I've ever read, and it occurred to me that it was like a huge black vortex that would suck early nineteenth century marriage plot novels into the void. It's the complete obverse of sweet girlie stuff: no lurve, no irony (I wonder if Cormac McCarthy has a humour mode? If he does, he certainly wasn't in it writing this), no insightful self-discovery or examination of the human heart. No, this is blea More...

55 comments like (23 people liked it)

Jun 22, 2011

Natalie rated it:

I'll be frank right up front: I loved this book. It's a poetic, metaphor-and-symbolism-rich wonder of a novel, and every bit as violent as its reputation states. McCarthy has such a seemingly effortless ability to render forth horrific and beautiful descriptions of everything from sunrises to Indian attacks that it's enough to make one weep with envy.

McCarthy certainly gives the lie to the nostalgic romanticizing of the Old West enshrined in American culture; these cowboys 'n In More...

15 comments like (18 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Eric rated it:

There are two ways to evaluate a book, as far as my unlearned mind can concoct at the moment. Stylish literary flourishes sometimes cloud our judgment when it comes to evaluating the plot itself, which is, after all, the reason why the book exists.

This book is well written. If I'm a 11th grader, and I need to do a book report, I'm drooling over the blatant symbolism dripping from each page. The scene is set admirably, though the repetitive nature of our brave hero's wanderings (at More...

17 comments like (36 people liked it)

Apr 26, 2011

Eric rated it:

Fuck yeah. This is great. I felt fully absorbed and enclosed in the nightmare. I was scared. McCarthy at his very best—to chose from so many scenes: Judge Holden under a ribcage parasol holding the halfwit by a leash, the two shuffling though the sun-bleached desert Golgotha bellowing threats and promises to Kid and Expriest who are hidden, cowering, “prone in the lees of those sour bones like sated scavengers” awaiting “the arrival of the judge and the passing of the judge if he would so pass”— More...

5 comments like (27 people liked it)

Aug 12, 2011

Stephen rated it:

Spilled...emptied...wrung out…soul-ripped...yeah, that pretty accurately basically how I felt after finishing this singular work of art. Ironically, I’m sure I only absorbed about 10% of the “message” conveyed in McCarthy’s epic exposition on war, violence and man’s affinity for both. Still, even with my imperfect comprehension, I was shaken enough by the experience that, though I finished the book days ago, I’m just now at the point where I can revisit the jumble in my head enough t More...

20 comments like (39 people liked it)

Jun 20, 2011

Chris rated it:

It seems that almost everybody raves about Blood Meridian and rates it the best novel written by Cormac McCarthy. I had already read three of his books prior to taking on Meridian; I was a fan, and regarded the book with a mixture of excitement and trepidation: excitement, because I had heard so many superlatives about it from other reviews - trepidation, for the exact same reason. It was with such conflicting expectations that I began; from word one the prose wasn't holding me for some reason, More...

2 comments like (16 people liked it)

Aug 28, 2011

Brad rated it:

Blood Meridian Or the Evening Redness in the West is so much bigger than what my brain has been able to process so far, but it will stick with me, and I will return to this text repeatedly and try to make sense of its nuances.

Cormac McCarthy is talking about big things in Blood Meridian, and he is doing them extremely well. But what are those big things? Is he talking about violence? The sacred? Violence and the sacred? Is it war, as the judge says? Is McCarthy talking about inelucta More...

12 comments like (11 people liked it)

Dec 04, 2007

Bart rated it:

In Cormac McCarthy's novel The Crossing, McCarthy proves he can write about about the travels of a wolf in a poetic and engaging way. In Blood Meridian McCarthy writes about three or four wolves, calls them humans - those characters he bothers to name at all - and shows that with enough talent and powerful prose, a writer and his work can be called "great" without having to develop a single character in 330 pages.

Among those who would be unsatisfied with the mere word " More...

6 comments like (24 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

Tedb0t rated it:

Blood Meridian is an astonishing work. It was recommended to me by the same person who got me into Moby Dick, and now I believe I understand why.

There are two major aspects I'd like to touch on with this book:

1) Prose. McCarthy is one of those rare literary magicians who, like Melville, is capable of sustained and continuous flows of poetry, often jaw-dropping in their scale and scope. Blood Meridian tends to oscillate from narrative action to descriptive passage. The More...

6 comments like (26 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Annette rated it:

This is the best book ever written. Ever. It is my favorite book. Ever. It is a piece of art. I want to wallpaper my walls with its pages it is so amazing.

Cormac McCarthy has a way with words that is inimitable and majestic. It seems as though every word is chosen with a purpose. You read this book and get chills once you stumble upon a word that has definition in triplicate...all the definitions are appropriate and progressively creepier.

This is a story of Manifes More...

10 comments like (16 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

Katie rated it:

I found this really hard to get into; 100 pages through, all that carried me were the sentences themselves, which might have been enough -- they're consistently amazing: precise, gorgeous, experimental in their use of language (to the point where I had to lol on the Greyhound)... but certain images began to stick with me, and not even the most violent, but those that occurred alongside the ritual slaughters and scalpings (the mule dropping off the side of the canyon, the bear swiping the Delawar More...

0 comments like (12 people liked it)

Aug 13, 2011

Marcus rated it:

I started hating this book early on. Just coming off reading Hemingway's sparse and beautiful prose, McCarthy's heavily metaphorical style, obscure vocabulary and dense sentences were maddening. I wanted to be able to just read the story without having to re-read it, without guessing who was saying what and without looking up words. I didn't start the book expecting Faulkner and as such, it was frustrating. Eventually though, I resigned myself to the style of the book and began to appreciate it. More...

3 comments like (8 people liked it)

Jan 28, 2011

Robert rated it:

Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian: or, the Evening Redness in the West (Vintage, 1983)

The whole idea of "the great american novel" really kind of misses the point because we have taken the original meaning of it and twisted it. The "great american novel" should probably today be caleld "the quintessential american novel," because the word great, in this context, refers to the novel that will encompass what we have been, why, how we got there, and where we we More...

1 comment like (6 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Aaron rated it:

I don't get people's love affair with this book. It's like if Kill Bill, Vol. 1 was consistently trumpeted as the greatest movie of all time. They both are cartoonish exercises in violence. They both are a pastiches of high and low art. They both have one stunning scene that wins over the critics (the Indian attack in Blood Meridian, the snow duel in Kill Bill) and then feel pretty flat for the remainder. And yet, Blood Meridian has become a darling of critics and now, with McCarthy's Oprah-appr More...

7 comments like (15 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

Meredith rated it:

Wow, what a gut-wrencher.
This book is so difficult to describe. Bare? Dismal? Hopeless? no, because those words imply ineffectiveness, which McCarthy's writing most certainly does not radiate.
The characters are at the same time distant and fully formed - we never see their thoughts, yet their personalities and their intentions in life are clear. There is such a lack of emotion, even fear, in this horrific Western world... even the most violent, repugnant, terrible actions are dealt More...

4 comments like (9 people liked it)

Dec 30, 2011

David rated it:

Cormac McCarthy conflicts me like no other author save Haruki Murakami. McCarthy's prose stylings sometimes make me go "Whoa!" and sometimes "WTF man could you just please use punctuation like a normal person?!" His style is very much part of the "experience" of reading this book. I kept wondering how long he spent crafting each sentence, whether he just belts them out like that or if each and every one is a finely-crafted piece of word-smithing that he lingers over More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Feb 04, 2011

Maciek rated it:

Blood Meridian is a novel that deromanticizes the West and strips off its John Wayne antics - here there's absolutely no place for the moral and the good, where murder is a fact of life comitted without a blink and discarded from thought later. The desert rewards the worst scoundrels and spits on the bodies of the innocent and old who are unable to defend themselves.

The novel begins with an introduction of a young teenager who's simply named "The Kid", though in fact there' More...

25 comments like (7 people liked it)

Dec 20, 2011

Marco rated it:

La guerra è il gioco per eccellezza perché la guerra è in ultima analisi un'effrazione dell'unità dell'esistenza. La guerra è dio. [...] Se la guerra non è sacra, l'uomo non è altro che fango antico.

Ho letto il mio quarto libro di McCarthy a bocca aperta. Letteralmente. La rappresentazione del Male, della violenza, che è poi la guerra, traspare da ogni riga, da ogni parola. Vengono utilizzate tantissime metafore, metafore disarmanti e impensabili che rendono chiara l'assenza totale d More...

3 comments like (4 people liked it)

Mar 12, 2011

Ellie rated it:

Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy is an absolutely mesmerizing read. How do I review this book? It seemed more like a phenomenon of nature than a text. It has all the qualities the hype proclaims: mythic, intense, an upending of the American western. It is based on a true story, the Glanton gang who rode ostensibly to protect towns from the indigenous population but who became more feared and bloodthirsty than any of supposed "savages" living in the More...

1 comment like (6 people liked it)

Apr 25, 2011

Caitlin rated it:

As I waited outside for my next class, a guy asked me what this book was about. In all honesty, I couldn't tell him. There is no plot. There isn't really a point A to point B feel either. More like a, just survive tone throughout the entire book. There wasn't one chapter where I could predict what would happen next. No goals or final destinations. This isn't that type of book.

Okay, back to the guy asking me a question. So instead of saying, "There's no plot" I said, " More...

0 comments like (6 people liked it)

Jun 29, 2011

Hamish rated it:

The man finished the book. He closed the pages tightly together then put one foot on the floor then the other then used his hands to push himself up out of the chair and then put one foot in front of the other until he had walked all the way to the book shelf and then put the book on the book shelf. The deer walked in. The main whirled around and fired once with his pistol and the brains of the deer went flying out the back of its head and painted the wall a color dark red like blood. The ma More...

4 comments like (9 people liked it)

Jul 06, 2011

Jamie rated it:

I can’t remember the last time I had to renew a book from the library to chew my way through it. For Blood Meridian to take two weeks and counting: well, there lies the beginning, and only the beginning, of my praise for it; this is just one hell of a book. I said it would take only one more novel to prove McCarthy my generational gap soulmate; it took less than that to seal for himself a top slot on my favorite authors of all time.

Grueling, gutsy; expansively dense. McCarthy doesn’t More...

2 comments like (4 people liked it)

Nov 20, 2008

Abailart rated it:

Blood Meridian

Some claim to have read this book more than 30 times. I can see why. But this is my first Cormac McCarthy novel and I need a long rest. It took me three years before I had the energy to read Moby Dick a second time. Moby Dick and Ahab, an apt comparison as both novels are densely packed, thick, startling of imagery, literary in the scope of allusions, and each contains a figure that seems at the centre: Ahab, and in the case of Blood Meridian, The Judge who is both seek More...

3 comments like (18 people liked it)

Jun 08, 2008

Frank rated it:

This book has moments of fleeting brilliance, and the last 50 pages of the book are almost flawless. However, there are 280 pages before that you have to read, which consist of, in my opinion, nothing more than barren landscapes, borderline shock-value accounts of depravity, and self-indulgent simile. It's a never-ending journey on the shoulders of quite possibly the most unlikable group of characters I've ever read, which in the hands of a particular writer, may work...McCarthy does NOT pull i More...

3 comments like (15 people liked it)

Jul 24, 2007

Annie rated it:

I couldn't really do justice to the storyline so here's the summary from the back cover:

"An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, Blood Meridian brilliantly subverts the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the "wild west." Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Jan 09, 2011

Caris rated it:

Let me preface this by saying that I may be bingeing on McCarthy and this may not be a good thing.

I didn’t really like this book. It was a chore to make it through, which really threw me. Every time I picked it up, my silly brain would get all excited.

“Ooh! A Cormac McCarthy book! Yes!” it would exclaim. But soon after the reading began, it would remember the previous day’s experience and would attempt to shut itself off.

“Let’s think about TV,” it suggested mo More...

32 comments like (19 people liked it)

Sep 08, 2008

Colin rated it:

Cormac McCarthy’s historically accurate Blood Meridian doesn’t have a lot of the indicators you get used to in reading a novel. By ‘indicators’ I mean the standards that readers come to rely on—plot, characters, etc. Though these aspects are intact, their path isn’t so obvious, so read with a careful eye. Blood Meridian initially focuses on a 14-year-old Tennessean, simply named the Kid, who joins a gang hunting for Indian scalps along the Texas-Mexico border during the 1850’s. Though the novel More...

5 comments like (11 people liked it)