alt Hacker NewsWait til you read Blood Meridian. The imagery he created with words, some of them his own creations, is just ... beyond compare. I'm reading The Road now, which comes from the same place. I can only read either in small doses. It's very intense, and the passages deserve to be read carefully.
Another contemporary writer who worked with new words in a very creative way was Gene Wolfe in The Book of the New Sun. Some were inventions using Greek, French, or Latin roots. Others were forgotten terms which he resurrected. Someone compiled a dictionary, Lexicon Urthus, which discusses the origins of certain terms and their placement within the series.
>I can only read either in small doses. It's very intense, and the passages deserve to be read carefully.
Absolutely. Similarly, I read the Tao Te Ching 4x annually, by reading the same single passage both before and after bed, daily. Both Laotzi's and McCarthy's density of construction is just soooooo human condition.
[Suttree book world] Harrington just found the eyeball in the junkyard vehicle — in a single paragraph humanity just oozes, including his toying with viscosity and shock, and re-toying again. Washes hands. The drunk boss having previously joked "yeah the driver only scraped his shinbones."
I am hooked. McCarthy's books jumped to the top of my bookqueue after reading a HN article a few months ago about his library/collections being catalogued, post-humously.
----
I've just read Dave Wallace's three major novels (Jest & King & Broom, ~2000 pages) and McCarthy is absolutely the better author, not requiring hundreds of footnotes to say less with more esoteric bullshit [0]. DFW just seems like a bully to me ("wow I'm so smart"—DFW, probably), and honestly his samizdat is about 800 pages too long (myself a former bored addict prodigy with poor family comms) [1].
Mostly I read DFW because he's my judge-brother's favorite fiction author — it felt like a challenging obligation/chore, much like our personal relationship. With both, I've felt mostly emptiness. For powerful shortform pieces, both are quite capable of emotional stirring (This is Water).
I laugh when I see this book on others' shelves, because they probably haven't read it and it isn't really worth the time to read [all of] it. A few simple questions of the "reader" verifies this. My own bullying is that "I have" [snooty], however much I wish for all that reading time back. Bullies making bullies =D
----
By page 100 of Suttree you are hooked. By page 100 of Jest you are bored [2]. I've yet to read more than six pages of McCarthy in one day. For Wallace my eyes would constantly glaze over dozens of pages and just think: what happened here?! why did author include [all of] this!?
Although I am tired after reading either author for twenty minutes, McCarthy's doesn't feel like the author is just wasting my time.
----
My McCarthy readlist is structured so: Suttree (current); Blood Meridian; The Road — is this advisable?
----
[0] DFW's footnotes == even more of his esoteric bullshit
[1] If you do read Infinite Jest, absolutely use a study guide(s) (specifically Aaron Swartz's incredible breakdown... which can reduce the book just just a few hundred pages). If you've ever suffered an addiction (whether yourself or crazybestfriends's), you probably don't need to suffer through any longform DFWallace.
[2] I understand this is part of DFW's "style" : the frenzied passages of speed addicts, thirty pages into killing a dog (e.g.) when three pages would have done better, more respectful of reader's time (addict or not).