33.1 Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy

I cannot read this book. I read one and a half chapters and gave up.

A while back I read - and thoroughly disliked - The Road, another work by McCarthy. It was, however, the only thing by him I had read, and I thought I would give him another try.

Mistake. Big mistake.

This book is just about as unreadable as The Road. The prose is deliberately stilted, and convention - like quotes around dialog and apostrophes in contractions - is ignored.

In a nutshell, it's junk. I couldn't comfortably follow it, and was disinterested in it - and the characters involved - nearly immediately.

The only reason I am not giving it the worst possible rating is because I didn't finish it, and I cannot in good conscious do that to something I didn't fully read. That said, I did flip around after giving up, and no, it clearly gets no better. The complaints above apply from page one right through the end.

I won't be reading any more McCarthy. Not my thing.