read any good books lately...

I finished Dostoevsky's The Possessed (as awfully protracted as it is, I couldn't help but enjoy it).

I finished Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Castorbridge (I had a difficult time fostering a connection with any of the characters in this middle class Wessex take on familial greek tragedies)

I finished Thomas Hardy's Jude The Obscure (I definitely adored the firm characterization of the few central individuals)

I finished Oscar Wilde's the Picture of Dorian Gray (I'd recommend it to most folks considering the themes he tackles here are themes I've been pondering over myself)

I finished Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (Can't say I came away giving a damn about any of the short novel's events or characters. Surrealist, sure, and I'll bet it has many metaphors I didn't quite catch on the first pass through, but why should I even try when I didn't care about anything else?)

I finished the Pessimist's Guide to History (Bitterly humorous list of most of the bleak atrocities, massacres, natural disasters and assassinations in history. 

I finished Ernest Hemingway's For Who the Bell Tolls (I can't say I felt any emotion stir, but the first half was entertaining)

I've been digging into The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (some real zingers mixed with some real snoozers - just like with most excellent short stories collections from a single author)

I've been digging into The Stories of Nabokov (1% plot and character and meaning, 99% the most beautiful, useless construction and usage of the force of language)

I'm in the process of finishing Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (At nearly 100 pages, I think I'm tired of the amalgamated strings of blurry stream-of-consciousness adjectives dealing with how awful it was for the south after the civil war. How many friggin' words do you need to describe a dirt road? The long, winding, arid, desecrated, deserted, lonely, disconcerting, humid, barren, barbarous, brutal, parched dirt road lay stretched for fifteen arduous, protracted, contrite, humble and vicious miles. I say it stretched for fifteen miles)

On my current reading list for the next few weeks (aside from finishing Absalom):

 

The Idiot, Dostoevsky

A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens

The Defense, Nabokov

Return of the Native, Hardy (Though I'd prefer to read Tess, I don't own that particular novel)

Hiroshima, Hersey (I'd forgotten that I owned a copy until I saw it pop up here)

Light in August, Faulkner

Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck

The Good Soldier, Ford

A Prayer for Owen Meany, Irving

Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon (I'll get to it sometime or another)

Sometimes a Great Notion, Kesey

As for McCarthy, I've read The Road, Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men, and Children of God. While I enjoyed No Country for Old Men, I found myself disinterested in the last fourth of it. Blood Meridian was competent, but Children of God seemed too long for even its paltry duration. I love the Road, but only out of sheer mechanised sentimentality. It is a shallow, manipulative, well-written novel.

As for Dune, I consider the first four to be my favorite science fiction stretch of all time. The build up and staggering plummet of the fourth novel really struck me. It's a shame that Heretics turned out to be a half-assed attempt at turning the Dune series into an action-adventure story. I've yet to bring myself to reading the sixth. I also have in my possession some of his son's Dune extensions, which I find quite laughable.

As for punctuation and grammar - I see it as a tool, not a compulsion. I adore Jose Saramago's work, especially Blindness, The Gospel according to Jesus and The Double (all of which bring out different, powerful emotions in me). the lack of punctuation in his works makes McCarthy seem like a damned obsessively compulsive English professor.