"Watch the coin, Davey."

I think this is one of those books that has a reputation. The book has almost like a cult of personality as Cormac McCarthy's most Cormac McCarthy novel. And then you get to reading it and beyond that intro it's almost like where are we going with this?

I'd like to propose a couple ways to read the novel:

1. The violence is the story. Lots of comments on here about how shocking the violence is. That's true but it misses the point. The violence in the novel is also historical, as the epigraph about scalping insinuates. The novel is literally about the world-historic levels of violence necessary to create the so-called "United States" and the barbaric depravity of the people engaged in this mission. The epilogue about the buffalo skulls attests to just how much killing needed to happen to "tame the West". It is a story about how the settlers were always the bad guys. Centering this violence may be shocking but we're all the inheritors of this violence - especially if you live in Texas. Someone's ranch house is probably built on the plains where the most violent scenes take place. There's probably a Dollar General there.

2. Wow there's a whole lot of tarot references. The morality of the story is spelled out literally by the tarot references. Get a Rider-Waite and see for yourself. In the scenes with the mummers the judge is "naked to the waist" while he picks something off of his body. He's being depicted as the Devil. Glanton is the Chariot. The kid is the four of cups. From this perspective it's not ambiguous how the novel feels about the Judge. He is an evil man and the things he says are evil. Right wingers wildly misinterpret the speech about war - "the ultimate art awaiting its ultimate practitioner" because he is an avatar of corruption and depravity.

The whole book is like that magic trick at the beginning if you focus too much on how shocking the violence is in the book, you'll miss what the book is saying about that violence.

This book is so painfully American. You get the sense that Andy Weir leans into speculative biology because writing characters from Russia or China would require him to know something about that history and culture.

Stratt is a a rah-rah American jingoist who thinks China is going to take over the world. And then Andy Weir says he doesn't like politics in sci-fi but his book is so blatantly pro-America that he just comes off as stupid. It's a sign of how dumb Americans have become that Andy Weir is so ignorant of geopolitics that he can't distinguish the Russian Federation and the USSR. Arthur C. Clarke had a pro-America bend but he wasn't completely ignorant of the Soviet Union.

I was looking for a fun poppy sci-fi book but this one is a waste of time.