Absolutely. The Hubski Book Club is open to all. It will be nice to have someone so familiar with the book. What promoted you to read this book twice?
A few reasons, firstly i'm a pretty big Cormac McCarthy fan and have read several of his novels: All the pretty horses, No country for old men, The Road. The first time I read Blood Meridian I really enjoyed it but had the constant feeling that there was a lot more to this book, hidden depths I guess. There is an old Irish saying "Uisce ag sileadh faoi an talamh" which translates as water flowing under the ground... On the surface it was a violent wild west saga full of cruel and weird characters but there was always a sense that I was missing something. And indeed I was. I started searching around and found out a few things that opened my eyes, the first of which was the Yale analysis class on Blood Meridian. Probably best left until you have finished the book. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgyZ4ia25gg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZFmf4T5L3o So once I understood what McCarthy was trying to accomplish I reread the novel a couple of years later and enjoyed it again in a whole new light.What promoted you to read this book twice?
I'm just at page 100 and after reading last night, I looked up images of scalped people/native americans. I could have done without the actual images and should have stuck to my imagination. This book is already pretty gruesome and to think that it gets more so is rather incredible.
Yea its pretty tough, all I can say is stick with it. There is a lot of debate over whether the violence actually represents anything or not. The book opens with 3 epigraphs: It is not to be thought that the life of darkness is sunk in misery and lost as if in sorrow. There is no sorrowing. For sorrow is a thing that is swallowed up in death, and death and dying are the very life of the darkness
– Jacob Boehme Clark, who led last year’s expedition to the Afar region of northern Ethiopia, and UC Berkeley colleague Tim D. White, also said that a reexamination of a 300,000-year-old fossil skull found in the same region earlier shows evidence of having been scalped
– The Yuma Daily Sun, June 13, 1982 Personally I think he is setting the tone here by saying "Humans are violent, we have always been violent". I'll let you come to your own conclusions.Your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint. Your acts of pity and cruelty are absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were irresistible. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time
– Paul Valery