Now Comes Days Of Begging, Days Of Theft

My current read. I know it's in vogue to jump on the McCarthy bandwagon but "Blood Meridian" has been on my to-do list for a long while. I thought "The Road" was depressing but this is probably the bleakest thing that's ever seared itself onto my brain -- in the most fascinating way possible, of course.


McCarthy's always a tough read and he makes the matter infinitely more complicated in this instance with untranslated pasages of Spanish and a complete lack of quotation marks. But I love the sparseness of his writing style and the way all that unspoken description bleeds into your head.

"He works in a sawmill, he works in a diptheria pesthouse. He takes as pay from a farmer an aged mule and aback the animal in the spring of the year eighteen and forty-nine he rides up through the latterday republic of Fredonia into the town of Nacogdoches."