Category Archives: LITERATURE

LITERATURE: On The Road Again

It always makes me laugh to think what authors must think of how readers interpret their words. It used to bother me in fact to think that readers turned and twisted things around to make something out of nothing, or … Continue reading Continue reading

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LITERATURE:Kafka on the Shore – Timelines

Easy reading so far; good thing, as the pages number 401.  We open with a first person narrator, a 15 year-old boy who runs away from home.  His mother long dead, his older sister–where?, but it is his father whom … Continue reading Continue reading

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LITERATURE: Next Up: Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami

Well for one thing, in putting McCarthy back and in interfiling the recently purchased books one in the "M’s" wouldn’t fit.  That’s part of the reason that this is my next selection. The main reason though is that I’ve been … Continue reading Continue reading

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LITERATURE: Up Next?

Usually I have a book already selected as the next to read.  But a three-day book didn’t leave me much time for wandering.  Then too, it’s a reluctant parting from McCarthy and while I have a few others left of … Continue reading Continue reading

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LITERATURE: The Road – Some thoughts on theory

What is the inborn nature of man? There’s a premise throughout the novel that pits hope against acceptance.  Even when hope fades, there is an acceptance that short of death, they must go onward.  There’s also McCarthy’s usual good versus … Continue reading Continue reading

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LITERATURE: The Road – Finale

Oh, I’m sure I’ll have more to say as the story settles into my mind to raise questions of the sort we don’t like to think about. There’s always a sadness to finishing a good book.  I wanted it to … Continue reading Continue reading

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LITERATURE: The Road – Showing

I’m within twenty-five pages of finishing this book and it’d be done a lot sooner (though I think I’ve broken a record here, at least for close reading versus the good old days when I read a book in a … Continue reading Continue reading

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LITERATURE: The Road – Again with the 4th Wall

(WARNING: Not only spoilers–as all my postings on lit may be, though my readings of past classics are not as threatening to the general populace as a recently published book such as this might be, but then again, who hasn’t … Continue reading Continue reading

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LITERATURE: Library Book Sale

How depressing; only 7 new additions to my list, and a couple have already been read but so long ago that they’ll go in the "to be read" pile. Angela’s Ashes – Frank McCourt, The English Patient – Michael Ondaattje, … Continue reading Continue reading

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LITERATURE: The Road – Meaning

There’s a change happening within the characters–as well there should be, according to fiction "law"; but who’dve thought that McCarthy would abide? Showing, via the dialogue, that as the man becomes more unsure of their fate, the boy, still frightened, … Continue reading Continue reading

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LITERATURE: The Road – Language Structure

Here then, is the antithesis of beauty in the beauty of words: The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the … Continue reading Continue reading

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LITERATURE: The Road – McCarthy’s Moral Question

McCarthy loves to throw out a question of ethics and leave the reader to decipher for himself beyond the character to go inside one’s own head.  He weaves it throughout this book as well, never letting us forget that we … Continue reading Continue reading

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LITERATURE: The Road – Style

Something clicked as I realized I’m at the halfway point in this book.  The sparseness of words, the white space, the dialogue, the emptiness of the visual text that matches the landscape of McCarthy’s world. No Country for Old Men … Continue reading Continue reading

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LITERATURE: The Road – Breaking Down the Fourth Wall

I’ve rooted for a character before, I’ve warned him not to open a door.  Never before, however, have I waited as he passed a light over a discovery and looked him in the eye in that moment of awe of … Continue reading Continue reading

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LITERATURE: The Road – Vision

Not merely a vision of a possible future, a warning of sorts, but a vision of man’s nature comes from this story, and it’s not the nature of man that enabled this mess, but rather what occurs later, in McCarthy’s … Continue reading Continue reading

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