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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3377 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 14, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Starting Blood Meridian. Surprisingly readable given what I've heard, but comically over the top violence and McCarthy's disregard for useful grammar objects, especially quotation marks, grinds my gears just as much as it did when I read The Road for a class in undergrad. Otherwise listening to HP 3 in Italian and reading a light Spanish book about a love triangle between three roommates.

It might grow on you. The style does provide this sort of relentless momentum to some of the action set pieces. By the end I found the general misery and despair more of an impediment than the prose.

My own experience with McCarthy was brief and memorable, though not in a good way.
I made a point of finishing the first chapter of Blood Meridian, but I was nearly immediately overwhelmed with the urge to grab the pen, typewriter, keyboard or whatever it was he produced this with and whack him over the head with it.
Simply atrocious.

I have to keep reading unfortunately because it's for book club. Other people seem to be enjoying it, so will have to see what they say.

Feed it into Claude and tell it to add punctuation for you.

Give in to the temptation. Rewrite the entire book with proper punctuation.

Funny, I don't remember noticing the lack of quotes in The Road. But when I heard Sally Rooney omits them that was all the reason I needed not to check her out.

No quotes: 🤯

No quotes, Irish woman: 😡

Lmao fair. Maybe if I re-read The Road today I'd find this stylistic device more annoying than I did on my first read. As I recall it's not a particularly dialogue-heavy book which might also make it more forgiveable.

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