Blood Meridian (Reread)

Audiobook this time, the narrator spoke much slower than I normally read, which really helped make some of the more cumbersome parts easier to parse, though I found it much easier to lose attention when listening compared to reading.

One of the greats, one of the few books that pop into my mind regularly, like an intrusive thought. This was my 4th reading and I noted a few things I hadn’t before, and went over some of the bits that hadn’t really stuck with me when reading to see if there was anything jumping out at me in the narration.

Not really much to say on this one that someone else hasn’t expressed better, though I don’t think I’ve read any other book that presents violence as well as this one does, when I read other “serious” books about war and violence I sometimes think about the woman from the meat camp and compare how real and hideous her death feels as a gold standard to compare whatever I’m reading against.

One thing that I first noticed on my 2nd reading and that has stuck out more strongly on each subsequent read through is the tertiary but frequent theme of the effect of technology on violence, killing becoming ever more efficient, organised, lopsided.

The Kid’s first exposure to and partaking in violence is simple, ancient, fists and bottles and knives, graduating to fire, then bows and spears and crude smoothbore muskets, then the six shot Walker revolver and other caplock weapons, then nearly modern cartridge firearms, the orphan near the very end of the book comes at the Man with a rifle that would have been considered absolutely cutting edge technology 10 years earlier and is now already obsolescent, the genocide that was its purpose complete.

At every stage, the more primitive kinds of violence do not disappear, but are simply joined by new, more precise means of destruction. The epilogue of the book seems to me to be the laying of train tracks, the coming of industrial civilisation, in the foreground the railway man, in the distance the carrion men, only the middle space is empty, the shape of the fresh hell this technology will enable unknown, it and the Man’s meeting with the buffalo hunter put me in mind of the Holocaust.

All the Lovers in the Night

Good, sad, lowkey, kind of frustrating, which I guess was intentional.

Very little happens but the protagonist goes on an emotional journey. Ending felt deliberately unsatisfying. Might have been more engaged if I was a woman.

Contains an interesting and realistic depiction of anxiety fueled alcoholism.

The Thirty-Nine Steps

A bit shit really.

Dull and contrived and just not really that enjoyable. The author lampshading the contrivances don’t make them any less eyeroll worthy or his stodgy writing anymore enjoyable. It’s foundational, I guess.

Some of the scenes are clever, a few almost rise to being funny, but mostly this was a chore. It was interesting reading something so effusively British Empirey/Edwardian though, you can smell the gin and tobacco as you read it. I read this in one go on a hot day while sunbathing which is probably the only reason I got through the whole thing, I picked it up because it was a Folio edition and was bound as well as my Folio copy of Kim is, so I assumed it would be quality. Greenmantle was included in the volume with it and I don’t think I’ll ever be arsed to read it.

The Crying of Lot 49

I’m not sure if I’m smart enough to completely get this book.

I very much enjoyed it after a brief initial hump. Some of the lines have burned themselves into my head. Pynchon really knows how to write that bleary, no sleep, half mad down a rabbit hole state of mind.

Has possibly the funniest sex scene in English Literature.

Ideology & Crime: A Study of Crime In Its Social And Historical Context.

Interesting little book from the father of modern Criminology. Mostly a history lesson and interrogation of the way societies through history thought about and handled crime and punishment and how the prevailing ideologies of their political systems influenced that. Only about 150 pages so quick reading, the Author quite obviously knowing his stuff manages to cram a lot into those pages though.

Sadly seems to be out of print.

The Road (Reread)

I had forgotten how brisk a read this was, I ploughed through it in the course of two days.

I read the road initially when I was maybe 16 or 17 and made little of it, reading it again I realise how much is going on here, beneath the very simple premise, and how much it has to say about the importance of morality, holding to what you value, actively choosing to be a good person.

I’m not sure why people interpret the end as hopeful however, I don’t see it, tranquil might be a better word, or bittersweet, especially considering the last paragraph.

When he talks about the trout & how everything where they were hummed with mystery I think what he’s saying is that these things that were old before men were were beautiful and virile and alive and they were that way not for anything to do with man but because that was their nature, not needing or seeking justification, and now they have gone.

Where they have gone the man has followed, as all soon must, and that’s OK, because that’s how it was always going to be. These things that existed before us & with us have gone forever, the sum total of their existence less than a mote of dust in the eye of creation.

Maybe the boy will know some brief happiness and may even have children of his own but ultimately mankind is going extinct, a fire guttering and dying under the ash drifting down out of the leaden sky. The biosphere is dead, the last human being will someday in the near future lay down on the road to make their camp and not rise again, and that will be it, but that’s OK.

Mankind was never going to be more than a blip.

Death is no lover, but neither is he an enemy.