I really hate William Gass. I think he's the best example of someone who can write a sentence just about better than anyone but never bothered to learn how to write a short story or novel, despite teaching generations of writers how to do that and also having a number of them published himself.
I can't remember what books I last talked about here and I know I can scroll up but I'll just ramble a bit aimlessly, if'n you don't mind.
I've read all the Harry Potter books this year for a project that grew in interest as I've gone about it. The first two are pretty forgettable, so it's interesting how large they became. The third is why it became a sensation, I think, and the fifth is where the novels become actually kind of good. There are a lot of problems with the series and it's often quite clumsy, but I think that's because she began writing an amusing story about a boy and these wacky wizards, so she'd just toss out incidental worldbuilding meant to amuse rather than reveal, but as the series went on she couldn't undo these silly little things and so had to live with them and make them sturdier. But it is a surprisingly good series and possibly one of the most important literary achievements of the last fifty years, whether we like it or not.
Been burning through Cormac McCarthy's novels as well. Suttree was kind of a slog at times, but the farther I get from it the more I like it. Sort of a backwoods Ulysses. It's also probably the funniest book I've read in years. Like, laugh out loud funny.
Blood Meridian is better on a reread, I find. I also think it's somewhat overrated, mostly because of Harold Bloom's many writings about the novel. It's a good novel, no doubt, but I also think it's the height of a particular type of McCarthyism, which isn't what he does best, ironically. It's him at the comedown from the lush evocative apex of verbosity that is Suttree but it's also missing the humor that makes his novels something so much more than what people tend to talk about when they talk about McCarthy. I think considering this his best novel has much to do with how we respect and laud serious ass shit about serious ass shit by serious ass ol boys, even when their best stuff are the jokes.
All the Pretty Horses is an interesting transition because all of his previous novels sold very poorly but this one went on to become a bestseller after it won the National Book Award. I think this might be my current favorite (though Suttree continues to bloom and unfurl over this year, over his career). The language is stripped back a bit but I think the success comes from the straightforwardness of the narrative. It has such clear direction and such clean motivations that he's abandoned, here, much of the murkiness that defined the first thirty years of his career. It's a beauty, though. And even makes certain points more powerful than Blood Meridian.
The Crossing is also great. I love the sidequestiness of it. The whole novel is three separate sidequests full of smaller sidequests where a boy loses more each time he sets out on some venture, returning, finally, with nothing and no one but the long empty road before him.
Cities of the Plain brings the two previous protagonists together and also leans back towards verbosity, but I think it may be one of his least successful novels. It has the sidequestiness of The Crossing but also lacks the clarity of All the Pretty Horses. Though it does lead us inexorably towards what the ending of All the Pretty Horses promised, with all its tragic stupidity.
No Country for Old Men is the most screenplayesque novel I think I've ever read, so it makes sense that it began as a screenplay and then became a movie. The movie and the novel are almost identical, but I think the movie is actually better. Mostly because of where it chooses to end. The novel sort of ambles past the ending of both the movie and the novel, giving a long drawn out epilogue feel. Which is good. It's all quite good, but I think the way the Coen's shoved the last 70 or so pages into five or ten minutes of screentime makes those 70 pages hit more powerfully.
Onto The Road now, which is another reread, and I already cried about twenty pages in.
Been doing lots of Arthurian research this year for a project that may interest someone someday, but I picked up Spear by Nicola Griffith wholly unprepared for it to be an Arthurian story. I never read marketing material or even the backs of books, so that's on me, but I did quite like this twist on Arthuria. One of the best versions of Nimue I've encountered and the triangle of Lancelot, Guenevere, and Arthur mirrors exactly what I was going to do, which is slightly annoying, but I suppose there's always room for more Arthuria.
Finished The Once and Future King before this and I quite liked that, too, and it's clear how much Rowling was indebted to White, but it's also interesting how this silly novel about a boy preparing for destiny becomes a philosophical tragedy. But I suppose that's the draw of Arthur, yeah?
Read Altered Carbon, which was pretty all right, though it's a reminder, to me, of how much I tend to struggle with cyberpunk. The genre is most interesting to me, I suppose, when it's a playground. Morgan creates a real dense and fun playground here with memorable tech and gadgetry and characters and sidequests, but as the novel becomes more and more about the PLOT, the less and less I'm interested. I think this is because of the noir/hardboiled roots of the genre. I jsut kind of have never given a shit about cops and robbers and all the badass things that happen along the way. And so when the plot threads begin to weave tightly together, I kind of just wish we were still smoking cigarettes on the swingset under that one halogen bulbed street lamp.
Read The Wake and Beast by Paul Kingsnorth, which are fascinating. Beast is just a flex. 200 pages with only a single character and his surrounding. A million people could attempt such a novel and every single one of them would be somewhere between unreadable to borderline unreadable, but Kingsnorth manages to keep you enthralled and compelled.
The Wake is written in [anglish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_purism_in_English), which is certainly part of the interest here. But it's also just a wild and savage story about hubris and monomania arrayed in revolutionary spirit.