I thought that I was going to love this book, considering I'm a huge post apocalyptic fiction type fan. Instead, I ended up initiating several aborted attempts to get past the first twenty or so pages and finally took the goddamn thing to my local used bookstore (the delicious Bookmans) and got like a buck or two for it. Why, you ask?

Because Cormac McCarthy, apparently, is a tardo.

Okay, maybe that's a little too much, but seriously? I don't care if you're the best fucking storyteller in the whole world, if you can't write a full sentence, take a fucking English class. Go to community college and try Comp 101. Here's an example of McCarthy's stellar grasp of language:

When it was light enough to use the binoculars he glassed the valley below. Everything paling away into the murk. The soft ash blowing in loose swirls over the blacktop. He studied what he could see. The segments of road down there among the dead trees. Looking for anything of color. Any movement. Any trace of standing smoke. He lowered the glasses and pulled down the cotton mask from his face and wiped his nose on the back of his wrist and then glassed the country again. Then he just sat there holding the binoculars and watching the ashen daylight congeal over the land. He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.

Grade school kids can do way better than that. Congratulations, Cormac, I now officially hate you more than Sarah Palin but still less than Barack Obama (barely, but still less).

So if you want to write like Cormac McCarthy, giant douche (and no relation to McCallister, at least from what I'm aware of), here's what you do:

Take a normal sentence and chop it into five roughly equal parts. It makes it seem like you've got more to say, even if you're just describing something as simple as using binoculars to check for anything out of the ordinary. Three times more to say, in fact, is what it seems to net you.

Forget about commas. Instead, just put AND between everything you want to cover in a sentence. In fact, while you're at it, forget all about parenthetical notation or quotation marks as well. Even though it flies in the face of common grammar rules, use colons to denote when someone's speaking. It makes you seem unique.

Once you've done this and gotten your book on Oprah's book club, congratulations! Kick back and roll around on your big pile of stupid people's money. Much like Mr. Magog, give me Palahniuk any day, especially Rant. True, it's dystopian futurist more than post apocalyptic, but probably my favorite book of all time.