Writers whose works I love: Neal Stephenson, Thomas Pynchon, Neil Gaiman, Margaret Atwood, Herman Melville, Ishmael Reed, Leo Tolstoy, Franz Kafka, Feodor Dostoevsky, Anton Chekhov, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and James Joyce.
Email at PeterRobJon at gmail
Twitter: BrevetCaptain
Sorry, Tom. I just give up. I will not finish Against the Day. Maybe not ever.
It’s beaten me. It’s too big , too many plots and characters, and in Pynchon, that goes with the territory. Too many notes, and I’m bored.
So I’m moving on to Chabon’s non-fiction—today, Maps and Legends. Then on to fiction—Hakurami’s 1Q84 and, at last, DFW’s The Pale King. It’s time to dance with that devil.
If you don’t like McCarthy we can’t be friends.
He’s just the greatest American prose writer since Faulkner. Pynchon is amazing, especially in V., Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason & Dixon; David Foster Wallace was a master, but didn’t pare his work down enough at times (imvho); Neal Stephenson makes literature out of Captain Crunch and pop-up ads.
But it’s McCarthy who tears away the extraneous and makes the leanest, rawest prose poetic and moving.
I’m going to finish all the other books on my nightstand asap and then just read all the McCarthy books left in his oeuvre. Maybe I can get a paper out of this man’s work; maybe it’s too powerful for me to touch without burning myself.
