After spending most of high school having the love of reading drained from me, in college The Stranger by Camus rocked my world. That and Blood Meridian really got me back into reading in a big way.

My go to advice is to try the audiobook if you are struggling. I think it’s the perfect voice for the book and hearing the words pronounced can really help with clarity. It never occurred to me that McCarthy was so focused on how a word sounds and how that can be used to convey specific emotions until i listened. A lot of the poetry of the writing stood out once I heard it.

Also to help with your investment, what helped me was viewing this book as not just a narrative but also as a work of philosophy. The books is very much about ideas. I would suggest while youre reading or listening to ask questions about what the book is actually telling you. As the book progresses you will get long dialogues or monologues, what ideas are being conveyed here? What do they tell us or what are they asking us?

The book is not really about a gripping plot that is structured in a way to keep you engaged and the characters are not written to be endearing or rich with inner-life to the point they seem real. BM is extremely biblical, there is rarely any interiority to biblical characters. The first words are “See the child.” You are witnessing this story, you are an observer but you do not have direct access to them.

Lastly I would say to read the epigraphs at the beginning, they are extremely important for telling you what this book is about. Why do you think these are there? What sort if story are they setting up for? When reading think about how any given scene could relate to them.

I do feel the need to read female authors when I get particularly annoyed by the depictions of their anatomy. You can only read about the swaying of breasts so many times. How many otherwise beautifully written novels reduce women to their chest? If things feel a bit too macho, I do think it’s nice to read other perspectives but I didnt become moonstruck by Toni Morrison because of her gender or race. Her brilliance, like all brilliance, is not exclusive to her purely physical properties or to say it simply, her outward appearance. Books are about ideas.

Race is also not something I make any check list for. I think its ridiculous to say that I dont see color but that it because I do think it is tied to their individual identity but it’s rare that that alone is why I read them. Even books that are completely tied to the author’s race have other reasons they are worth reading. That all being said, I would like a more worldly view. I think we should read everything that’s good and everywhere around the world has distinct contributions to the art form.