Diesel has convinced me to participate in his contest to make him read stuff, so I suggest that he read Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.
I recommend this book for a few reasons. For one thing, it’s a sparse book. McCarthy doesn’t waste a single damned word. Not a syllable, even. There’s no Dickensian word-wasting, serial-writing, going on and on without really saying anything, while also constantly making asides, like this one, and that one, that you might have noticed I am extremely fond (to be sure, I’m not criticizing Dickens, I think he was a genius, and quite funny as well). McCarthy can say in a few words what it would take other authors a lifetime to write. He’s one of the few authors who can actually make a picture be worth no more than 15 or 20 words. It’s that kind of sparse.
However, to achieve that minimalism, it also tends to be dense. I’m a word-nerd. I love learning new words, and McCarthy doesn’t fail to satisfy, while simultaneously making me look like a retard. Every morning I’d stumble into work, bleary-eyed and slack-jawed after having spent hours reading a handful of pages with a list of adjectives to look up, and then once I’d learn the definitions I’d think to myself, “You arrogant fucker, you’ve done it again. You used the absolute perfect word to convey your image flawlessly. I hate you.” Seriously, if I ever meet McCarthy, I’m going to give him a swift kick in the nuts right after I’m done shaking his hand.
Which brings me to my final point; if you’re looking for hate, sadness, depression, and wish to uncover the obsidian black recesses of the human soul this Christmas, you can read no finer novel than Blood Meridian. I know what you’re thinking, “Why would I want to read about horrible things at Christmas? I want to read about puppy dogs and kitty cats saving Christmas from the evil robot ninja Jews!” Give me a break. You can read that garbage on the toilet while you’re squeezing out an hangover dump. You need to read Blood Meridian during the holidays because at any other time of the year you’re liable to read a few pages and think, “Well, mankind is at this point worse than the most horrible thing I can humanly comprehend, so I might as well kill myself.” Even if you read this during the holidays you might be best served by calling the suicide hot-line in advance and letting them know you’re taking this book on. They’ve been trained for this type of thing. Though, it doesn’t hurt to have copious amounts of alcohol on hand so you can drown your sorrows in beer and whiskey. You might want to add some NyQuil and make it an umbrella drink because that could be the only thing to knock out your consciousness long enough for you to forget the deplorable acts committed in this book.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fantastic book, and I have no reservations in recommending it, but it’s probably best saved until you’re in an extremely stable, healthy, and positive frame of mind or you might just blow your brains out.
Added: Here’s a sample of one of my favorite parts (borrowed from Tbogg, because, hey, great minds think alike, and fools never differ):
They began to come upon chains and packsaddles, singletrees, dead mules, wagons. Saddletrees eaten bare of their rawhide coverings and weathered white as bone, a light chamfering of miceteeth along the edges of the wood. They rode through a region where iron will not rust nor tin varnish. The ribbed frames of dead cattle under their patches of dried hide lay like the ruins of primitive boats upturned upon that shoreless void and they passed lurid and austere the black and desiccated shapes of horses and mules that travelers had stood afoot. These parched beasts had died with their necks stretched in agony in the sand and now upright and blind and lurching askew with scraps of blackened leather from the fretwork of their ribs they leaned with their long mouths howling after the endless tandem suns that passed above them. The riders rode on. They crossed a a vast dry lake with rows of dead volcanoes ranged beyond it like the works of enormous insects. To the south lay broken shapes of scoria in a lava bed as far as the eye could see. Under the hooves of the horses the alabaster sand shaped itself in whorls strangely symmetric like iron filings in a field and these shapes flared and drew back again, resonating upon that harmonic ground and then turning to swirl away over the playa. As if the very sediment of things contained yet some residue of sentinence. As if the transit of those riders were a thing so profoundly terrible as to register even to the uttermost granulation of reality.
