Blood Meridian is considered McCarthy’s masterpiece. It bathes in violence. An occasional refrain on the Reading McCarthy podcast is, “no author has killed as many babies as McCarthy.” This is so. One coming to McCarthy with only this perception, and perhaps the images of a burntout country and ash from The Road, they probably think the books are reveling in that violence. That is not so. The Kid comes out of Tennessee into the West and tumbles and starts problems until he falls in with Captain Glanton’s gang of scalphunters. Among that gang eventually are The Kid, Toadvine, Expriest Tobin, and several others. The Judge is the neonlit attraction. He arrives over and again from nowhere and leaves to nowhere and while he’s there he wanders around nude and glowing and pontificating. The Judge attracts a lot of attention from readers; maybe the expriest attracts just a little less. On this my second read, the expriest stood out the most and it is easy for the reader to imagine the Kid with the Judge on one shoulder and the Expriest on another whispering in his ears. ...

Really good! I find that I do not have complicated thoughts. I bought this copy of The Portable Milton from Vintage at some long past point and it sat on my shelf for ages. Some time ago I removed it from my shelf and, decided I’d never read it, put it on the “to little free library” table. By some cosmic chance I then saw the painting Pandemonium by John Martin: ...

Featuring one of the least-relatable, most annoying protagonists of a book that I’ve read in recent memory! The story follows a therapist in the wake of her mother’s death by, more or less, assisted suicide in her terminal illness. I do not understand the title, because there are not a lot of ghosts (maybe two) and none of them are at any point vengeful. Basically, the woman buys a model house and it is full of problems. Also, she starts to hallucinate her dead mother. (Mild spoilers below.) ...

Note: Rather annoyed to go looking for metadata on this book and find RAW:PReP, PEDAGOGY, AND THE POLITICS OF BAREBACKING which comes 10-years later and includes an afterward from Dean. While I later reference Hatred of Sex I will also have to read this and perhaps return to some of my critiques below. Introduction Tim Dean’s Unlimited Intimacy released in 2009, 28 years after the first CDC reporting of what would eventually be called AIDS, and 3 years before the FDA approved Truvada (PrEP) for pre-exposure prophylaxis. Its situation in time makes Unlimited Intimacy a little quirky. Reading in 2026, so many of the statements feel ancient, and the mindsets archaic. Such that generational differences cannot be put aside while considering the contents. Perhaps as a result of those generational differences, some of Dean’s contentions and conclusions feel strange and ill-considered. In particular, Dean’s paintbrush when it comes to men who bareback is obscenely wide—in some paragraphs he seems to suggest that anyone fucking without a condom is hard mostly as a result of gambling with HIV. ...

I purchased this book after hearing Brian Koppelman recommend it on the Ringer’s JFK Rewatchables episode. I’d heard of it before, but safe to say it was never on my radar. It sat on my shelf for a few months and as I was winding down the final chapters of Moby-Dick I walked over and stared at the shelf and picked it up. It’s hard to argue with a first page that starts like this: ...

I listened to this very brief audiobook (about 3 hours) in 15-30 minute increments over a few days, while falling asleep. This is a short audiobook and performed very well by its author. Carrie Fisher was such a treasure. One of the early figures in my life in a lot of ways, via Leia. I have a framed portrait of Leia (artist Mike Mitchell, via Mondo) in my living room and think of her a bit as a patron saint. I had no idea for years that another figure of early childhood, Aggie Cromwell of Halloweentown, was her mother, Debbie Reynolds. ...

I first read Giovanni’s Room four years ago. I remember gripping it tightly the whole time, bent over and racing through it. Not 200 pages, Baldwin moves through the story so incisively that it really does feel like the drop of a guillotine. I do not remember detesting David, our narrator, so much on my first read. Depressed moody people may be able to relate to either being or wanting to be in an empty home with a big bottle of wine and looking moodily out of windows (certain I can), but David does begin to feel like an alien. In his early experience with Joey, he vanishes out of insecurity and fear. That’s understandable—coming of age, a much different era than we’re in now. Even in our current era, I can remember first realizing I’d fallen for a boy in one of my high school classes, and that was terrifying. ...

Sometimes a classic is a classic for a reason. I remember picking up Moby-Dick sometime in elementary or maybe middle school and bouncing off of it instantly. Hardly surprising. I doubt I thought about the book at all between then and a few months ago, reading that Cormac McCarthy drew some inspiration for Blood Meridian from Melville’s work, and apparently this was McCarthy’s favorite novel. Not difficult to see why, or to see the parallels. ...

I read this for our July Small Press Book Club, pairing it with Math for the Self-Crippling, with this book being suggested by Math’s author, Ursula Villarreal-Moura. I often feel unqualified to evaluate poetry, and that feeling persists. Though, the visual layout decisions and the sense these give appeal to me. Perhaps more to me than to the others in my club. Poem Cardinals, A Novena enters to bracketed segments, weaving across the page before eventually resolving outside of those brackets. My favorite of the layout experiments is on page 34, which features a blank page tailed by a footnote that can only be explained as a typographic panic attack. ...

I’ve read Tom Sawyer several times over the years, physically and audibly. This is my second time listening to the audiobook as read by Nick Offerman, who seems born to read Twain. While I think years ago I’d have given this five stars, I find it is not my favorite Twain by a long shot. It is fun, and funny, but nothing to me compared to Connecticut Yankee. Anyway, I listened to this while falling asleep at night and it was perfect for that. I cannot recommend more strongly Offerman’s readings of Twain. ...