All The Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

The more I get to know Cormac McCarthy's books, the more I like his sparse and (almost) punctuation-free writing. It's a little difficult to get into at first but then it just flows as naturally as thinking. Our thoughts are mercifully free of the constraints of punctuation, aren't they? It's just a flow of facts and emotions, impressions and predictions, making this a writing style as close to spoken storytelling as it gets. Reading this book is like listening to an old grandfather relaying the adventures of his youth. I love that. It's beautiful and comforting and exciting and I just kept wanting to know what happened next. That's not to say there weren't slow parts, though. Some of the wandering through the brush was overly long and detailed, and the aunt's monologue towards the end was a bit tedious, but nothing a little strategic skimming didn't fix.

Not only do like his writing, but I love the author's sentiment, too. It's not mawkish or overdone, but original and real. All the Pretty Horses is about friendship when everything else is stripped away, just as The Road is about the bond of family in the very bleakest and most dire of conditions. If nothing else, one still has the choice and ability to be a friend, to be a mentor. Cormac McCarthy, you will always have a place on my bookshelf.

The first volume of the border trilogy - tells of young John Grady Cole, the last of a long line of Texas ranchers. Across the border Mexico beckons - beautiful and desolate, rugged and cruelly civilized. With two companions, he sets off on an idyllic, sometimes comic adventure, to a place where dreams are paid for in blood. (back cover)

What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran in them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise. pg6

The last time that he saw her before she returned to Mexico she was coming down out of the mountains riding very stately and erect out of a rainsquall building to the north and the dark clouds towering above her. She rode with her hat pulled down in the front and fastened under her her chin with a drawtie and as she rode her black hair twisted and blew about her shoulders and the lightening fell silently through the black clouds behind her and she rode all seeming unaware down through the low hills while the first spits of rain blew on the wind and onto the upper pasturelands and past the pale and reedy lakes riding erect and stately until the rain caught her up and shrouded her figure away in that wild summer landscape: real horse, real rider, real land and sky and yet a dream withal. pg132