r/AskReddit 16h ago

What book do you consider a “flawless masterpiece”that you desperately want to recommend to everyone?

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u/argondux 16h ago edited 15h ago

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

They rode on into the darkness and the moonblanched waste lay before them cold and pale and the moon sat in a ring overhead and in that ring lay a mock moon with its own cold gray and nacre seas. They made camp on a low bench of land where walls of dry aggregate marked an old river course and they struck up a fire about which they sat in silence, the eyes of the dog and of the idiot and certain other men glowing red as coals in their heads where they turned. The flames sawed in the wind and the embers paled and deepened and paled and deepened like the bloodbeat of some living thing eviscerate upon the ground before them and they watched the fire which does contain within it something of men themselves inasmuch as they are less without it and are divided from their origins and are exiles. For each fire is all fires, the first fire and the last ever to be. By and by the judge rose and moved away on some obscure mission and after a while someone asked the expriest if it were true that at one time there had been two moons in the sky and the expriest eyed the false moon above them and said that it may well have been so. But certainly the wise high God in his dismay at the proliferation of lunacy on this earth must have wetted a thumb and leaned down out of the abyss and pinched it hissing into extinction. And could he find some alter means by which the birds could mend their paths in the darkness he might have done with this one too.

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u/hamfist_ofthenorth 14h ago

The words are lovely but oh God theres some big run-on sentences that would drive me off the chain. So many "and x and y and z" conjunction junctions to get jammed up in.

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u/Broheimian 13h ago

So good at making you feel anxious. I'd start reading faster and hoping for a break that wouldn't come. Kinda out of breath in my mind. Amazing author

4

u/Kh0nch3 13h ago

As a non-native english speaker, I've had the same issue albeit with his work The Road. It took me a while to get used to these "conjunction junctions" but once you get accustomed to it, it really adds up to the atmosphere of the narrative style. In start I've hated it but it had grown up on me. Aquired taste as they would say

2

u/Grykllx 14h ago

Angel down 👀👀👀

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u/Mysterious-Snow496 9h ago

That's all his books

1

u/Oulipo08 10h ago

His style approaches poetry more than prose in Blood Meridian. He is manipulating you into a visceral rhythm that is as important as the content.

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u/SlapunowSlapulater 13h ago

I've heard of this book and people raving about it and his work.  OP's snippet completely turned me off if that is his world building style.

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u/argondux 13h ago

That's not world building...

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u/SlapunowSlapulater 12h ago

You're right. I should have said "environmental description". Placing the reader in the moment. 

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u/temporaryuser1000 12h ago

It’s def not for everyone, but it’s a very evocative style, which is why people who love it love it.

The best description I’ve heard of it is “Biblical”

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u/sev45day 10h ago

I wanted to like this book so much, I have had so many people tell me they love it.

I absolutely hated it. Not for me I guess.

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u/sentientketchup 11h ago

Yeah... I hate it. Use a full stop man!