Cormac

I'm a huge fan of Cormac McCarthy. This began with All the Pretty Horses and continued with the rest of the Border Trilogy. If you haven't read it, I implore you to read the trilogy. If you love books, at the very least read All the Pretty Horses. McCarthy's writing style can be frustrating at first - he doesn't use quotation marks, and in his western books he uses some Spanish - but I think it causes you to become more involved with the story. You actually have to pay attention to what's going on instead of being on book-reading-autopilot.

The Road has been on my bookshelf for quite awhile. For some reason, I felt like it was time to read it. I'm glad I started. It's a story about a man and his young son in a messed up America. I'm a hundred pages into it, and that's really all I've gotten out of it. If you remember a previous post, I complained about a hundred pages of drivel, and you might be thinking that this sounds like a hundred pages of crap, but it's not.

I think anyone that writes - poetry, songs, novels, reports, essays, checks - owes it to themselves to read at least one McCarthy book. If you don't know where to start, I suggest one of the two in this post. If you have a literary crush on McCarthy like I do, you already know what I'm talking about.

"He could remember everything of her save her scent. Seated in a theatre with her beside him leaning forward listening to the music. Gold scrollwork and sconces and the tall columnar folds of the drapes at either side of the stage. She held his hand in her lap and he could feel the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer dress. Freeze this frame. Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned." - The Road (18,19).