intersection of land and violenc

I don't think I ever read and set out to find something in that reading; I just read and allow myself to discover whats there and if it inspires me, then I read and reread like a banshee.

I keep re-reading Alan Paton's Cry the Beloved Country because he makes the land of South Africa into an achingly beautiful character that slowly erodes from page one. For me, the land is more important than anything else (without it, how can anything else be? even the interactions between people occur? and yes, the slander hippy applies to me), and I'm trying to learn how to write the land into a presence that isn't cheesy, especially as the story that I'm working on exists upon and within the earth.

For similar reasons, I've reread Blood Meridian twice, but the violence keeps me from rereading it again, though I keep turning back to Cormac MacCarthy (I read The Road eight times in two weeks and if I could tell you why, then I'd've begun this blog with that) to learn how to be ruthless with language and judicious with violence (with all my problems with Blood Meridian's violence, none of them are because its gratuitous: its the reality of the US-Mex border) because the subjects that I'm obsessed with are ultimately integrated with the land and defined by violence.