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Showing posts from June, 2020

Book review: Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

This book was discovered during pregnancy in my local WHSmiths. I used to go there as a little child and pick out some new gel pens as a weekend treat. Yes, I love my stationery. My children I teach will tell you that! I have a special drawer with stationery treats in for star of the week presents. I have a special box with my stationery in that they can’t touch and I have my classroom stationery box that they can explore and use. Anyway, I’ve gone off piste. I could talk pens all day. But I’m here to talk Blood Meridian. I picked it up because McCarthy’s The Road is taught in the A-Level Dystopian module. We compared The Road with The Handmaid’s Tale (when it was on the cusp of going big). The Road has a sparseness to it like Blood Meridian. Like HT, BM was published in 1985. From the start, I was enthralled with McCarthy’s exceptional descriptive writing. The way he describes landscape is like nothing I’ve ever read: simplistic in lexis but detailed in syntax. He uses plenty of syn