Somehow I managed to finish the two books I've been reading this week so I can take a couple of fresh ones with me. It was a particular relief to complete Blood Meridian. Obviously a great, great novel - McCarthy seems to invent a completely new style, a rhetoric all of his own that evokes in astonishing detail an entirely fallen world - but one so grimly shocking that I'd honestly hesitate to recommend it to anyone of faint heart. As far as I can tell the violence is everything and the writer is saying that this is our true condition. And the problem is that as long as you are reading the novel you know it's true.
The novel was heavy-going in another, different way, just to make life that bit more difficult. It's so well written, with a kind of brilliant density, that I found myself on almost every page slowing down to savour just how good the writing was. Quite often I'd read the same paragraph two or three times as if checking if what I'd read was really so powerful, so right - and it was. But when you're keen to finish a book simply to meet artificial deadlines of your own, this quality was not quite what I was looking for.
Fortunately Alain de Botton's The Architecture of Happiness proved to be well-written in quite a different way - in a style that seemed designed to enable easy, effortless, reading. Lots of good ideas, as usual, but not quite the same verve as his best stuff. A touch formulaic - but he invented the formula, and it's a good one, so forgivable.
And now it simply remains for me to choose one or two tomes to ease me through the cramped hours ahead. No more McCarthy for now though.
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