The Glass Castle and The Road

I read The Glass Castle right before I read The Road, so that's two books about pitiful starving children in a row. Meanwhile, the next book group pick is Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

I also can't stop thinking about a bit from Cormac McCarthy's NYT interview, which I blogged about yesterday:

McCarthy's style owes much to Faulkner's -- in its recondite vocabulary, punctuation, portentous rhetoric, use of dialect and concrete sense of the world -- a debt McCarthy doesn't dispute. "The ugly fact is books are made out of books," he says. "The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written." His list of those whom he calls the "good writers" -- Melville, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner -- precludes anyone who doesn't "deal with issues of life and death." Proust and Henry James don't make the cut. "I don't understand them," he says. "To me, that's not literature. A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange."

His is a very purist view of writing. I admire his view, but I'm not sure I share it. It's a great point for debate, though.