Cormac Mccarthy's Personal Library

I may give "The Road" a chance though.

The Road could be seen as overly masculine in its portrayal of a man and his son against nearly the entire world, which is often the fantasy of male prepper types. Some oppositional takes to this would be e.g. Cory Doctorow's Masque of the Red Death, where he presents the dichotomy directly in a post-apocalypse world and argues for the more optimistic outcome, wherein people work together in a non-exclusionary way to overcome whatever the apocalyptic scenario is, which might be considered a more feminine perspective. Others taking that perspective would include Rebecca Solnit in "A Paradise Built in Hell."

In the Too Like Lightning series, Ada Palmer takes on the male/feminine sci fi angle directly by creating a near-utopian society of mostly gender neutral people. At one point in the novel a character argues that in fact they've created a feminine society of women, and therefore aren't prepared to handle the outlier class of people that want to create war, who have for the most part began to present explicitly as men.

I don’t “love” either artist to be sure. Is that also dismissive? I’m not sure.

Thinking masculine is a criticism is quite a tell.

He did ok with Alicia in his last couple books, but even there he flounders some. "If I had a baby I wouldn't care about reality"? Hmm, ok?

"His face was all covered in girljuice"? C'mon bud.

But no writer is flawless.

I see the violence as a refutation of the idealized, sanitized version of the West popularized in mainstream Westerns. Where law and authority = good, even though the Glanton gang was funded and armed by US authorities

His worldview seemed to be that humans as a species are extremely violent and capable of the most inhumane acts and we’re hanging on by a thread. Some of his writing often covered what just a slight altering of our societal moral compass might look like.

Probably my favorite author of all time, him or maybe Delilo.

> The old man shook his head doubtfully, paying the band of his cap through his fingers. I'm satisfied they caint get no worse, he said.

> But there are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse, only Suttree didn't say so.

Love it

If anyone has any ideas on what the point of violence in art is, I'm open to hearing it. Obviously horror is a genre and so is gore, and people seem to enjoy being shocked. I don't think that is what McCarthy was going for though. And he wasn't going for the vengeance-catharsis angle like Tarantino either.

"Stella Maris" is a great novel that could only be written by someone who was very knowledgeable about math. As far as art that engages deeply with math and science, I don't know of anything comparable. Most artists would focus only on the human drama of discovery, without being able to engage with the subject matter.

However, I would consider "mastery" of a math textbook to be you have worked through almost all the chapters, can do a reasonable chunk of the exercises, and could TA the course without too much trouble.

While I don't know for sure, I doubt McCarthy achieved that level of understanding for all the yellow books he owned. I think buying a math textbook on an interesting topic and then not making it very far is a very common and human experience.

TL;DR: An old testament reference to the "malevolent god". E.g. "god in the old testament wasn't so nice or forgiving.."

> In Gnosticism, the Demiurge is the lesser creator god who fashioned the material world and is often seen as the God of the Old Testament, Yahweh. Unlike the supreme, unknowable God, the Demiurge is ignorant, imperfect, and sometimes malevolent, responsible for the flaws of the physical world and the imprisonment of the divine spark within humans. Gnostic beliefs see a spiritual journey not as submitting to the Demiurge, but as a process of escaping his creation to return to the true, good God.

See also: https://gnosticismexplained.org/the-gnostic-demiurge/

The judge is an incarnation of evil and a pedophile so I don't think that's his Mary sue

He thought his huge library should be taken as a research tool and sign of 'conscious ignorance' of the vast things you don't know, rather than taking a consumer mindset to it, which you see a lot of people do when they brag about how many books they've read.

> The revisionist Western is a sub-genre of the Western fiction. Called a post-classical variation of the traditional Western, the revisionist subverts the myth and romance of the traditional by means of character development and realism to present a less simplistic view of life in the "Old West". While the traditional Western always embodies a clear boundary between good and evil, the revisionist Western does not.

In the spirit of fairness, I found some fan favorites from /r/cormacmccarthy and if these are representative of his most powerful prose I don't know what to say:

"It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog's, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jeda, in Babylon. A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before this torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets."

A "heraldic tree...left afire"? That's, er, not good. It's actually bad. And "auxiliaries routed(?) forth into the inordinate(?) day"? This is like the guy in the Community Arts writing class who gets a lot of praise but could really use an editor.

And the 'ands' are just interminable. And this and that and the other thing and one more and something totally different but also this and that. Good lord, someone give this man a period, or even a semi-colon. Here's another exemplar of a sentence that runs on more than the horses in it.

"That night he dreamt of horses in a field on a high plain where the spring rains had brought up the grass and the wild flowers out of the ground and the flowers ran all blue and yellow far as the eye could see and in the dream he was among the horses running and in the dream he himself could run with the horses and they coursed the young mares and fillies over the plain where their rich bay and their rich chestnut colors shone in the sun and the young colts ran with their dams and trampled down the flowers in a haze of pollen that hung in the sun like powdered gold and they ran he and the horses out along the high mesas where the ground resounded under their running hooves and they flowed and changed and ran and their manes and tails blew off of them like spume and there was nothing else at all in that high world and they moved all of them in a resonance that was like a music among them and they were none of them afraid horse nor colt nor mare and they ran in that resonance which is the world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised."

"that resonance which is the world itself" is just royal purple prose.

I apologize for disliking something others like, it doesn't seem fair, but I get the feeling that Cormac McCarthy is one of those "favorites" for people who don't have a lot to compare it to. Anytime someone tells me their favorite author is Cormac McCarthy, I'm always tempted to ask, "Who's your second favorite?"