"Three Novels That Knocked Me Out"

[babylonsister]

None of these look like 'light' reading, but I thought someone here might like to read the reviews...

Three Novels That Knocked Me Out

http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/three_novels_that_knocked_me_out_20101111/

[BlueState]

1. I just finished reading McCarthy's The Road

I too was knocked out and agree entirely with your assessment of the novel.

I will have to check out the other two books. Thanks for the recommendations.

[exboyfil]

2. Love McCarthy

Check out

Blood Meridian
No Country for Old Men
The Border Trilogy especially The Crossing

I think The Crossing is the best of the Border Trilogy.

[eilen]

3. This is my favorite part of the article

"This novel demonstrates what a novel (short stories too) can do that no other fictional art can, including plays and films. Staged drama inevitably includes the presence of an audience, the watcher. There’s a distance between us and the action, even as we get caught up in it. Most films take the camera’s point of view as the baseline perspective, then shift in and out of characters’ POVs, which are necessarily only seen or heard. Written language is so non-sensuous—it’s no more than marks on a surface—that it almost seems to bypass the aggregate of senses that we call our self. It mainlines deeper than that, into the mind behind the senses, into the perceiver, the meaning-maker, the creator of realities. Thus when we enter the point of view of a character in a piece of artful fiction (written so well as to not break the reader’s trance, to not show the seams), we become that character. We think, sense, speak and feel as that person. An amazing intimacy takes place in private, between each of us and the page. Farewell, boundaries. No wonder we love to read.

After dissolving these boundaries, some writers then give the whole thing another twist. They use dramatic irony: while the reader inhabits the character, the reader also knows more than the character does. In “Room” we are Jack, but we also know the tragedy of Jack’s situation and the dire possibilities. It’s this tension that drives the story and makes Jack’s voice so poignant."

That is why I have loved reading from the time I was 5.


Oh, I heard an interview with the author of "Room". Very compelling. I have had Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" on my reading list for some time. I had not heard of the other novel but after reading "King Rat", I have avoided prisoner novels. It made me want rice with egg in it. I don't want to crave lizards.

[SheilaT]

4. I could not finish The Road.

Perhaps my problem is that I've read almost every doomsday/apocalypse/nuclear holocaust novel ever written, but I found it not very original, highly unbelievable (could not figure out how the hell they were eating) and generally just not up to the standard of many earlier novels.

Try Alas, Babylon, which has not been out of print since it was published in 1959.

I have Room on reserve from my local library.

[pitohui]

5. oh yeah like "making babies the meaning of life" is all that deep

i don't get "the road," it's just cruel and stupid, the world ends but as long as your son survives it's all cool...c'mon that's just sick people if i want sick i'll go to the source at least the divine marquis was honest about what he was doing...all america is about "it's for the children" fuck that noise, sheesh

there's nothing more cheap and shallow than falling back on "oh the children"

by the way, there was only one novel mentioned, unless we have to click more than 3 times which i'm not gonna do, it's the 21st century, clicks are no longer free...

also as sheila t pointed out, if you're an experienced reader of sf, then "the road" is just a boring rip off because you've read this or better, w/ more attempt to try to explain and create why it happened, a thousand times already