Right after this, from The Plot:

Jacob Finch Bonner, the once promising author of the “New & Noteworthy” (The New York Times Book Review) novel The Invention of Wonder, let himself into the office he’d been assigned on the second floor of Richard Peng Hall, set his beat-up leather satchel on the barren desk, and looked around in something akin to despair

That’s quite enough cliché for one novel, and it’s the very first sentence.

McCarthy’s belief was that you didn’t have to use quotation marks as long as you made it clear who was talking.

He was plain awful at making it clear who was talking. (Read and loved The Road; decided No Country for Old Men couldn’t possibly be worth the bother.)

I still might try that one again later, but it was painful. Didn’t make it out of the first chapter.

Either of Harrison Scott Key’s first two books–The Largest Man in the World and Congratulations, Who Are You? (his newest, How to Stay Married, is also amazing and hilarious, but since it’s about rebuilding from his wife’s long term affair, it’s not 100% funny like the other two).