Blood Meridian

Dubbed as one of the ultimate Great American Novels by some, I looked forward to reading this, but DNFed at 30%. It's basically a violent (anti-)Western with lots of descriptions of landscapes. I have no idea why it is included in some lists of speculative fiction.

Why did I quit? The prose didn't click. I thought it was contrived, and convoluted because of that. Taste obviously, as lots of people seem to like its poetry. Lots of reviews on Goodreads extensively quote examples of sentences & entire passages, so take a look at those to see if it could work for you.

I also don't buy the premise of the book - or what the general consensus seems to be on its premise - namely the fact that man is depraved. "Man" is such a generalization that statements like that are hardly interesting. True, at times some humans act in a depraved way, but the vast majority of people I know are good at heart. Then again, if I had kept on reading, I might have seen McCarthy was being ironic. Who knows?