At this point, I'm about 100 pages into No Country For Old Men. The plot has picked up quite a bit, and a lot of new characters have been introduced. Something I've found that I'm not sure if I really like is that McCarthy doesn't use a lot of conventional punctuation. I get the feeling that maybe this is just a contemporary authors thing, Chuck Palahniuk had a very similar style. There are no quote marks for the dialogue. This makes it hard to follow at some points. It takes me a while to get used to his style when I pick up the book for a sitting, but after a few minutes, I don't really notice the absence of certain conventions, and the book goes a lot faster.
One thing I've really liked about the book so far is the first person narrations by the sherriff at the beginning of each chapter. A lot of the themes of the novel are presented here, I think. He talks about how there is true evil in the world, especially the part of the world that this novel takes place in. There's no point in trying to govern bad people, it's impossible. Anybody who belongs on death row will never get there. I thought that these themes were all thought-provoking, or at the least, they made me want to read on.
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