Suttree
By the author of Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses, Suttree is the story of Cornelius Suttree, who has forsaken a life of privilege with his prominent family to live in a dilapidated houseboat on the Tennessee River near Knoxville. Remaining on the margins of the outcast community there--a brilliantly imagined collection of eccentrics, criminals, and squatters--he rises above the physical and human squalor with detachment, humor, and dignity.
Stats for nerds
5recommend
7mentions
7people
2011–2023years
71% recommend29% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Unrelated to his typewriter, I'm currently reading Cormac McCarthy's Suttree, and I'm really enjoying it.
I had previously only associated McCarthy with The Road and Blood Meridian, but I'm glad I gave some of his other work a shot.
- I’ve listened to 130 audiobooks in 2022 so far. I think I’ll get one more in before the new year but it won’t make this list. Some stood out:
Greek Mythology series by Steven Fry. Not literary adaptations nor scholarly treatises; just accessible, fun reads with enough accuracy and attention to detail for a layman like me.
I’m working my way through Cormac McCarthy. This year I read Suttree and The Crossing, which are both excellent IMO.
I discovered these beautifully written character observations: Matrix (Lauren Groff), Small Things Like These (Claire Keegan), and The Crimson Petal and the White (Michael Farber).
Not exactly unknown in the fantasy genre, but Joe Abercrombie’s Age of Madness trilogy is great. I think Abercrombie is actually an awesome writer. For instance, he has this trick for composing his big action sequences almost entirely through POV vignettes from disposable characters, which I think is a remarkable idea that essentially fixes one of the commonest problems in fantasy (plot over characters).
On Writing (Stephen King). I read a few writing guides this year and was by far freshest.
Collected Fictions (Borges).
Darkness at Noon (Arthur Koestler) is a classic in the same vein as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
Shadow Divers (Robert Kurson) is a true-life story about divers discovering and exploring a remarkable wreck. Read this by accident, turned out awesome.
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (George Saunders) was one of those times where I knew little about a topic going in but got swept up by the author’s eloquence and enthusiasm.
I rediscovered Michael Moorcock’s Elric series thanks to new audiobook recordings. The Witcher but good.
Second Place (Rachel Cusk) was a batshit boilerroom melodrama. My first Cusk, will read more.
The first three books of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth series are great, but particularly The Eyes of the Overworld, which I was surprised to find was hilarious.
I reread some classic Philip K Dick, including Flow My Tears and Stigmata, and More than Human (Theodore Sturgeon).
The first two books of The Dark Star trilogy by Marlon James are both huge things, but worth it for fans of super dark fantasy. The setting really works for me, as far too much of this genre is basically set in a hyper caricature of medieval Europe.
Le Guin’s Earthsea Cycle might be the best fantasy series for me. Tenahu might be one of my favourite books of all time.
The first two books in Gene Wolfe’s Latro series are superb and perhaps just as good as his New Sun novels.
Gateways to Abomination by Matthew Bartlett is a gross, super dark, and fun little horror collection.
I read East of Eden for the first time.
Here are some books that were enjoyable but had some problems for me:
The Royal Game (Stephan Zweig) was a super interesting novella that just sort of stopped.
The Elementals (Michael McDowell) was an awesome horror novella with a mostly excellent cast of characters and plot, whicho was almost totally let down by an unsavory trope that’s unforgivable in something written in 2014.
The Blacktongue Thief (Christopher Beuhlman) is the first novel in a new grimdark series with some interesting variations on familiar tropes, although the characters were somewhat flat overall.
Here are some books I read in previous years but have stuck in my head: Grief is the Thing with Feathers and Lanny, Roadside Picnic, The Vegetarian, The House on Vesper Sands, My Name is Red, The Lathe or Heaven, The Gloaming, The Worst Journey in the World, The Fisherman, At Night All Blood is Black.
Things I read this year I wouldn’t recommend: Lord Foul’s Bane (offensive, poor writing), The Cement Garden (tries to be shocking but is quite boring), Lapvona (major disappointment), Them: Adventures with Extremists (superficial), The Wrack (feels trivial post COVID).
- My highlights from this year:
1. "How to Measure Anything" (Douglas Hubbard)
Presents a few simple techniques (confidence intervals, Monte Carlo simulations, regression analysis, Bayes, etc) to help with decision-making. E.g., should we build this feature or spend the same money on marketing?
I put it alongside "Thinking, Fast and Slow" (Daniel Kahneman), "Superforecasting" (Philip Tetlock), "The Art of Thinking Clearly" (Rolf Dobelli), etc. These books explain how our thinking is often flawed; "How to Measure Anything" gives you some tools to avoid flawed thinking.
Note: if you already know the math (a lot of people on HN would), you might not get that much out of it.
2. "Why We Sleep" (Matthew Walker)
As I read this book I kept thinking about all the people I knew who would benefit from it: family and friends whom I want to have healthy happy lives, managers who believe that they'll get more out of people by pushing them to work crazy hours… and lots of people who think they’ll get more out of themselves if they sleep less.
With references to studies, the book explains the different factors that influence sleep, what your body does during sleep and the different phases of sleep, how your body—mostly the brain—benefits, etc.
For days after reading it I kept telling friends about things I'd learnt from it. One of my favourite was how certain types of bird are able to sleep: they line themselves up in a row, with the birds on each end putting only half their brain to sleep. This way they can keep one of their eyes open—the one furthest to the end—so they can keep watch. Then after a while the birds on the end will turn around and sleep the other side of their brain.
Fascinating!
My only complaint is that it very rarely mentions the actual numbers behind studies. E.g., there might be a mention of a lack of sleep and an increased risk of diabetes or depression or heart attacks, but there's no reference to the amount the risks increase by.
3. "Shoe Dog" (Phil Knight)
The story of Nike, told by the founder. I honestly don't care about Nike but that's not the takeaway—it's not about shoes or T-shirts or Michael Jordan. It's about a guy trying to keep a business alive: almost from day one there no let-up, the company is continually under threat.
Also the early employees are a really fun bunch.
4. "The Master and Margarita" (Mikhail Bulgakov)
Fiction. It took me a while to warm up to this but I'm glad I stuck it out. I think the charm is in the language and the crazy mix of characters, the way religion is dealt with in a very human way; the tension, the fun…
I really struggle to describe this book.
5. "Shantaram" (David Gregory Roberts)
Fiction. I was looking for a book about India. I've never been, and I thought I might learn something and get a feeling of what it's like to be there.
I didn't. Not in the same way that I could feel the heat in "Heart of Darkness" (Joseph Conrad) or the sun and the trees in "From the Holy Mountain" (William Dalrymple) or the weight of the world in "Suttree" (Cormac McCarthy).
But it's a good ride of a story.
6. "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories" (Delmore Schwartz)
I knew this book from university. And then a few weeks ago: I needed a break from the world of tech and productivity and work, and this did the trick. It is so far away from that. Think: creative types working on books and poems and plays during the depression, struggling, self-conscious, observant, talkative…
- The only Cormac McCarthy novel I've read is Suttree and it's incredible. Apparently it's semi-autobiographical, and it reads like a Huckleberry Finn outcast/hobo/dark alternate reality and extremely funny and sad the entire way through. It's entirely gripping and so very well-written. I read it voraciously a few summers back after a trusted friend's recommendation.
- Suttree by Cormac McCarthy.
- >This is my biggest issue with all McCarthy's works. They feel like pointless exercises in sadism and cruelty, where the forces of evil are literally superhumanly powerful (like the judge) and nihilistic misanthropy is the only sensible philosophy.
I think Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men are like this, and The Road to a lesser extent (the evil is mortal men, it's just there's a lot of them). As others have mentioned, not all his books are like that. Suttree is downright funny at times.
I've always thought Cormac McCarthy has a great fear of evil and war and those bleak stories are his expression of it. Humans are in a downward spiraling race of shedding their humanity to be capable of greater acts violence so that no violence could be done against them. And those that don't engage in that are eventually overcome, like Llewellyn Moss in No Country For Old Men - someone capable of handling themselves, but was never able or willing to be so ruthless. It's why ironically The Road, grim and miserable, is one of his most hopeful books - the boy lives and they remain "the good guys". Blood Meridian certainly the most hopeless, and possibly a reflection how he was feeling about these fears at the time.
I'm not a literature person but that's my take on those.
Consider the Border Trilogy if you ever want to give him another chance. Blood Meridian is an anti-western, but the Border Trilogy looks at the frontier lifestyle from a more humanist perspective and deeply mourns the loss of it.
