this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2026
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Cormac McCarthy doesn't use punctuation because he "doesn't believe in it". His books are terrible to read. They're clunky, unclear, difficult to parse, and read like a middle-schoolers first try at story time. James Joyce, his inspiration, same story; I can't even get through one chapter of anything he's ever written.
I realize I'm in the minority when I say this, but grammar has rules for a reason. When you don't follow the same rules as everyone else, when you don't adhere to the reader's expectations, that makes it more difficult for the reader, not less.
If you were to take the list of all professional basketball players, and sort them by the number of free throws missed per game, you'd see the top of the list is dominated by Hall of famers.
That's not because missing free throws makes for a good basketball player. Or even that it isn't important in basketball to be able to make free throws. It still remains important at every level of the game! But some of the people who miss a lot of free throws were just so utterly dominant at other parts of the game that they had long successful basketball careers despite being bad at an important skill for basketball players.
Cormac McCarthy and James Joyce have a signature style, yes, but I'd argue that they're successful despite that, rather than because of that.
The Road is one of my favorite pieces of writing. It's art like anything else. The lack of punctuation really made it feel raw and close to home.
I think that's the point too, you know? His writing style acts as a literary device in and of itself. It's not always like that, but when it's like that I feel it helps drive home the scene.
And I say that while I agree 100% that it's hard to read.
The road felt like a stream of consciousness to me. It flowed so well that I tore through it in 2 days because I just couldn't stop reading lol. I'd love to be* that immersed in a book again but nothing else I've read has come close
Have you read Gone Girl? That’s the single most unputdownable thing I’ve ever read
Joyce is meant to be read like poetry. It plays off the sound of the language. His stuff is genuinely awful to sit down and read, just like it would be awful to sit down and read through a collection of poetry (to me anyway). Some Authors play with language in a good way, like the way Hemingway rarely attributes dialogue and forces you to pay attention and understand why the character would say something like that. It also reads very minimalist and leaves a lot to your own imagination and voice.
And this is where I feel like the mental state of the reader affects the way they are likely to respond to a given text.
Whenever I'm reading a good book (or poetry), I am able to mentally narrate the text and enter a flow state. Dialog is narrated with purpose, and with a story it basically turns into a film in my mind. My appreciation of the text is affected by how well I can conceptualize it.
But my friend has aphantasia. He can read and understand the words on a page just fine, but that's all they are to him. It's hard to puzzle together certain elements of deeper meaning when all you're really looking at is the relation of words to one another.
Point of clarification. I think there's a big difference between reading something where your internal narrator is a beat poet as opposed to a broadcast news presenter. If you slowly absorb Joyce and narrate it yourself properly it can be enjoyed. But if you sit down and read it like you would a news article, just trying to scan for info as fast as you can, you miss the entire point of the endeavor.
I only read the beginning of the Ulysses (had to return the book sooner than expected) and the flowing of the words and concepts one into the other is absolutely unique. I felt like I was carried among by the gently flow of a river.
I agree. I read The Road recently since it's my wife's favorite book and holy shit it was exhausting at times. I enjoyed the story to a degree, but the stream-of-thought writing style and unspecific grammar took me out of it. If it had been written in a more understandable prose I think I would have enjoyed it more; but would it have been as famous then I wonder
The Road is so god damn depressing that the writing style was the least of my concerns while reading
I think you're in the vast majority.
When it comes to the readers expectation, things become a lot more complex. I don't remember the exact words, but Brandon Sanderson talked about promises to the reader, where it's OK to do surprising things, but expectations must be carefully managed in that surprises must not feel like betrayal. Poor execution of this is why everyone hates the "...but it was all a dream" trope.
Ok theres 2 replies about Cormac McCarthy, there's clearly something I'm missing contextwise about understanding rules and how to break them.