Blood Meridian (1985) by Cormac McCarthy
In Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy provides the reader with an overwhelming experience of cowboys roaming the range in search of scalps, either Mexican or American Indians.
Where Books and Readers Come Together
In Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy provides the reader with an overwhelming experience of cowboys roaming the range in search of scalps, either Mexican or American Indians.
In The Art of Fiction’s preface, Gardner writes: “About all that is required is that the would-be writer understand clearly what it is that he wants to become and what he must do to become it.”
Master Class in Fiction Writing (2006) by Adam Sexton is a useful tool and guide along the way of crafting memorable fiction.
One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) by Gabriel García Márquez is a brilliant book by a true master, storyteller and magician. While on a family vacation in Acapulco, Gabriel García Márquez became struck with a vision of a story that, in two years, would become the sensational novel called One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Not only has Coetzee brought David’s character to life and allowed to live his own life the way the character desires, the reader is simultaneously not repulsed but compelled to keep reading, keep digging, keep hoping like David that punishment will not go on forever.
”The fair girl advanced and bent over me till I could feel the movement of her breath upon me. Sweet it was in one sense, honey-sweet, and sent the same tingling through the nerves as her voice, but with a bitter underlying the sweet, a bitter offensiveness, as one smells in blood.”
In most of Cormac McCarthy’s books there is usually a male character on some sort of quest.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871) by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson illustrate the child-ego’s attempt to mature and understand its own mortality in a world often found morally strange and ridiculous, a world that adults eventually learn to accept as normal.
The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) by Joseph Campbell is the book that awakened in writers and storytellers in publishing and in screenwriting to the larger scope of mythology as metaphor and to the underlining structure of stories.
The Masks of God, Vol. III: Occidental Mythology (1964) by Joseph Campbell casts a large net over what it is to hold a Western faith in distinction from an Eastern faith and how such distinctions developed among the varied belief systems over the ages.
‘What we call a novel,” writes Foster, ”would nearly everywhere in non-Anglophone Europe be a roman. That term derives from romanz, the universal term for lengthy narratives in verse prior to the age of print.
The 39 Clues (2008) by Rick Riordan is a mystery/action-adventure series for young teens and is quite a fun and insightful read.
The Stranger or L’Etranger (1946) by Albert Camus (who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957) is translated from the French in my edition of the book by Matthew Ward.
“There was nothing to do about his father, and he had thought it all through many times. The handsome job the undertaker had done on his father’s face had not blurred in his mind and all the rest of it was quite clear, including the responsibilities.”














