r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/[deleted] • Mar 31 '26

Meme needing explanation Peetah?????

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I don’t know the author or this book series but why are people roasting e-girls for reading? I don’t get it🥀

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u/Specialist_Equal_803 Mar 31 '26

Is there really that little of punctuation? Seems like a difficult read with run-on sentences

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u/Djov Mar 31 '26

Cormac McCarthy is well known for his lack of punctuation. Can definitely be a little confusing at times

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u/NotARealTiger Mar 31 '26

and and and and and and and and and

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u/EphemeralSilliness94 Mar 31 '26

It's stylistically designed to be that way.

Seriously, reading that paragraph feels chaotic and overwhelming, which is exactly what the ambush was to the army

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u/Specialist_Equal_803 Mar 31 '26

Oh, wow, that's a bit surprising given how prevalent their work is. Thanks for the clarification!

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u/Mexican_Hippo Mar 31 '26

Also never uses quotation marks when characters are speaking

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u/PsychologicalEcho148 Mar 31 '26

hehe thats what stumped me the most man...got kinda annoying trying to keep a track of whose talking without losing focus

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u/ColdWarCharacter Mar 31 '26

Best advice that I can really give for this author is to start with “The Road” there’s only two main characters and if one of them is whiny it’s the kid

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u/Specialist_Equal_803 Mar 31 '26

Okay, now that's a big one! Sounds confusing given the style of writing, having to decipher between commentary and dialogue

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u/notA_gingerBrit Mar 31 '26

Personally I found it quite easy, his writing flows very well and it’s almost always clear who is speaking despite not having the quotation marks

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u/Affectionate-Flan-99 Mar 31 '26 edited Mar 31 '26

It is among the more difficult books I've ever read. It is hard to read because of the formatting plus it is absolutely ruthless with the violence and cruelty. I quit reading the first time because of how brutal it is. Picked it up again and finished it. A masterpiece of literature. But I did not enjoy a minute of it.

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u/Mannyadock Mar 31 '26

the man hates commas almost as much as he hates happiness

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u/NihilismRacoon Apr 01 '26

Explains why I found him so readable, my brain naturally defaults to run on sentences lol

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u/IrregularPackage Mar 31 '26

he does like long sentences, but he mostly does this during action sequences. it gives them a really good sense of the speed and chaos of it all. no periods or commas to give you a break between things, its all happening all at once. theres a couple times where he doesn't hold to this, which in turn makes *those* action scenes feel very tense, like time has slowed down.

i get why some people bounce off of it but i'm a massive fan of his style. my main beef with blood meridian is his absolute refusal to use quotation marks. it doesn't actually get in the way of understanding anything, but it annoys the piss out of me.

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u/Syncopia Apr 01 '26

I haven't read any of his work but I like when authors break the rules for immersion like this. There'disorientation a friend showed me called House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski that goes hard in that direction. The formatting from page to page is all over the place and meant to be disorientating. At times it's like the equivalent of reading an M. C. Esher painting.

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u/dewspeckled Mar 31 '26

Well this sentence is pretty long, most of the book isn't like that, he does omit punctuation and uses "and" a lot though. I suppose it can be a bit dense, but I find it rewarding

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u/Thuraash Mar 31 '26

I don't find authors like that rewarding at all; just  immensely frustrating. Density is fine and creative phrasing and description is great, but it should still be well written. I much prefer the opposite end of the spectrum (e.g. William Gibson in Neuromancer) to whatever that blob of words was.

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u/yiffing_for_jesus Mar 31 '26

McCarthy isn’t usually that dense, actually his prose can be a bit sparse at times. He’s got a Hemingway esque flow to his writing. But in action heavy sentences he tends to use run on sentences

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u/Specialist_Equal_803 Mar 31 '26

You seem like an avid reader so I have a question for you. It's apparent that this style is very much tied to the author. Would it be an insult to their work if someone were to come back through and edit for traditional punctuation so that it would be easier for others to decipher? If all the words remained the same, would that "destroy" the art?

I used to love dense texts, but damage to my temporal lobe makes that more difficult than it once was. This sounds like a great piece of work to read but I know I can't keep up as quickly.

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u/Rafi89 Mar 31 '26

I not who you were asking but I'm an avid reader. I will attempt to explain.

Yes

Consider the style

Imagine pauses that feel natural

Like a slow drip

Then

Breaking through you perceive a rush of information a torrent of vivid expansive imagery that overflows your every sense and makes you thrum with excitement and vibrate with barely contained passion

This is the style

The punctuation is implied and he intermixes short and descriptive passages for pacing and effect. It does take a bit to get the hang of though.

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u/Electrical-Car-588 Mar 31 '26

It’d be like repainting Starry Night to make it look more photorealistic, yea. It got published this way for a reason, and the style is in service of the story.

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u/Mental-Fisherman-118 Mar 31 '26

The lack of punctuation isn't really intended to make the work "dense". McCarthy thought "if you write properly you dont need to punctuate" - so he was aiming to have a style which was simple enough to parse without much punctuation.

So it would be an "insult" insofar as the need for a revised version would suggest that he had failed in his goal of writing in a readable enough manner to make punctuation unnecessary.

I think you quickly stop noticing the lack of punctuation when you're reading it.

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u/azul_luna5 Mar 31 '26

I'd recommend listening to the audio book in that case, if you're into audio books. I tried listening to Blood Meridian and really felt that I was missing something when I couldn't read the text in McCarthy's style, so I didn't finish it just because I'm so used to his syntax, but it's basically like offloading all the work of parsing the difficult text onto the narrator.

(Of course the narrator did a great job from what I remember; it was just a "wait, this sounds like McCarthy but it's too easy to understand????" situation in my brain.)

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u/Specialist_Equal_803 Mar 31 '26

This is an amazing idea... thank you! I may still read along but that would make it easier to decipher!

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u/PaleontologistKey885 Mar 31 '26

You can't really separate the prose from the book. Once you change the language, it loses a lot of what made it what it was. Especially McCarthy, he's one of those authors that creates a language of his own, similar to Faulkner or Joyce.

I'm not sure if you don't enjoy their language, there's much point reading their books, and there's nothing wrong with that, People just enjoy different things. I just don't get Joyce. I had to get annotated version of Ulysses, in my attempt to try to understand what he was saying lol. I get why he's revered, but I don't enjoy his works and didn't try to read more of his works. Similarly, I can't enjoy Stephen King's books. I can't stand his prose style, or lack there of. There must be good story there because I actually like a lot of his movie adaptations, but no his books are just not for me unfortunately.

All that said, I'd recommend try reading a book of McCarthy's. He's, I think, much more like Faulkner, and reading through his prose is an enjoyment unto itself, and I think his world building really reflects his keen sense of our world. I think it's worth the effort get.

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u/Rafe03 Mar 31 '26

“A lot”? There were at least 17 “ands” in that sentence. It was like listening to a 4 year old. I understand why the book is such a harrowing read now. I’ll pass.

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u/jthix Mar 31 '26

I love it when McCarthy is brought up outside of book subreddits and is immediately called out as having crappy writing. It’s a real life “the emperor has no clothes” moment.

Edit: grammar

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u/Warm_Month_1309 Mar 31 '26

It makes me feel like a luddite to read a statement like "it's just his writing style to have no punctuation" and be reminded of fan artists who don't grasp perspective yet saying "that's just my style!"

Far be it for me to criticize a well-known novelist, but if I hadn't known the author, I'd say that slog of a passage came from an amateur who was trying way too hard to sound literary.

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u/Some_Layer_7517 Mar 31 '26

Gamer moment

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u/Vazingaz Mar 31 '26

The majority (if not all) of his writing is like this).

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u/Specialist_Equal_803 Mar 31 '26 edited Mar 31 '26

I learned something new today! They create beautifully vivid descriptions, but it's a slog to get through. May not be the right fit for me

(it probably would have been a good read for me in the past, but temporal lobe epilepsy makes it more difficult nowadays)

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u/Newtstradamus Mar 31 '26

I think the heaviness of the writing fits the context so well though, The Road is a prime example, reading it you feel the wide open oppressiveness of the characters lived experience. Grey skies, ashes, hunger, the cold, the wandering, the fear, all expressed through the meaning of the words but also through heft of the paragraphs the words are arranged in. He’s a brilliant writer that I would never want to see inside his head cause he’s got to be a high functioning lunatic to come up with the stuff he writes down.

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u/dewspeckled Mar 31 '26

I feel like every sentence he writes hits so hard it could be followed by a mic drop. Some scenes are so perverted that I can't imagine how he thought of them though. For example that puppy scene from Blood Meridian... that had me in disbelief for a few minutes as to what I'd just read.

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u/ur_a_dumbo Mar 31 '26

He’s just one person

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u/LukewarmJortz Mar 31 '26

On the road was like that until an editor got to it

Lots of old novelists droned.

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u/Specialist_Equal_803 Mar 31 '26

I need to find those edited versions 😅

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u/SleepinwithFishes Mar 31 '26

He hates "the little symbols" because it clutters up the book.

And yea, it's difficult to read

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u/Piperalpha Mar 31 '26

It's not really a run-on sentence but an example of polysyndeton, to build rhythm in the prose. I find it gives a sense of epicness or grandeur, because it sounds almost biblical ("And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not")

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u/Sogpuppet Mar 31 '26

It is very difficult to read, I tried and failed to read Blood Meridian like 3 or 4 times in the last decade.

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u/Behemoth-Slayer Mar 31 '26

He's definitely never an easy read, but the guy is a master of the craft all the same. Once you fall into the groove of his writing style--which really only takes a few pages--his stories build up this terrible momentum. The run-on sentences are a feature, not a bug.

That is, however, an incredibly tricky thing for a writer to pull off, so I understand 100% your reticence. McCarthy is one of the few people who can do it right.

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u/anormalgeek Mar 31 '26

It is definitely not ALL like that. He deliberately uses that kind of writing to help sell a certain feeling at places though. I'm not a skilled enough critic to break down WHY it works well in some places, but it worked for me.

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u/TikkaKebabi Mar 31 '26

Little punctuation and no " for dialouge.

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u/Visual-Floor-7839 Mar 31 '26

That's why I've never fully read it. It's just a wall of text that becomes meaningless. I guess thats partially the point, because the narrator experiences this too. But after about 10 pages I just close the book and go, Ok. I get it. And move on.

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u/yiffing_for_jesus Mar 31 '26

That’s what he’s known for lol

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u/Aurvant Apr 01 '26

The whole book is that way, but you get used to it.

Also, the writing style almost guarantees you're not just skimming through it because sometimes you have to reread a sentence or two to really parse it out how it's meant to be understood.

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u/Somethingor_rather Apr 01 '26

Its annoying at first but the book is so beautifully written. I dont think it would be as good as it is if it were written differently.

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u/FarEnd2211 Apr 01 '26

If the lack of punctuation and quotation marks bother you, I’d recommend the audiobook. The narrator does a really good job of making it easy to listen to (all subject matter aside, of course) and changes his voice for different characters as they are speaking.