I wasn't that familiar with McCarthy's peculiar vernacular, certainly didn't get every reference, but he had me at "See the child" and the payoff for going with it was huge. Have you ever read Russell Hoban's "Riddley Walker"? Wonderfully worth the effort of struggling with Riddley's narration. It's ultimately beautifully moving and is an irreducible part of that world and those characters. It's interesting to deconstruct these kinds of mastery of language and, of course, it's subject to critical analysis and no one has to like it or even acknowledge its objective merit. I had the instinct to just keep reading and not be distracted by the elements that I didn't fully understand or deverted into trying to lock in each passage's meaning line-by-line. It's high art, not an instruction manual. I don't imagine I'll ever fully understand Blood Meridian but I look forward to reading it again.

It can be like when someone gets hung up on Vermeer's painting technique - - the quality of the work invites that sort of interest - - but that's not the first or most striking thought when you look at "View of Delft".

A subtitled "Spirited Away" is a beautiful and flowing thing, where the dubbed version is jarringly discordant and distracting.

I came to Ian M. Banks Culture series later in life and loved them and had been through the first few volumes when I learned of Banks' passing and it utterly changed the way I read the subsequent volumes. Such a loss that I haven't brought myself to read the last. He was so full of joy and humor and ideas that I couldn't wait to see where he would go next.

Name any actor, other than Hanks, that you'd rather see solo on the screen that long? And was the Hunt character supposed to be happy having a work-obsessed absentee partner? She's sad and disappointed because she loves him and while he loves her, she's not a priority. She's sad, at least in part, because she's not going to leave him and is resigned to settle.

There's a brief moment when he's climbed into the emergency raft in the wind and rain and dark, and that sound of pouring rain in the middle of the ocean in the middle of the night is stunning.

Sorry for your loss and just your thought to quote Adams says good things about the both of you. I always loved this one: "Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans."

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.