A couple of weeks ago I finished Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses. The book is well known and is considered one of the great works of modern American literature. It won the National Book Award in 1992 and a big Hollywood movie adaptation with Matt Damon was made. I picked it up months back on the clearance shelf at Half Price Books for two bucks. What an excellent steal.
All the Pretty Horses is grand and epic although that kind of sneaks up on you. McCarthy lets the scenery slowly engulf you and the book becomes much like one of the epic poems of old. It was another one of those rare books that once done, I just had to sit in my easy chair and exhale.
I greatly enjoyed it. I live in Texas, but the 1940's west Texas described seemed almost as foreign and exotic to me as central Afghanistan. Mexico seemed a different world. This was a nice, powerful read.
So right now I'm reading a couple of books. I'm still plowing through Marcel Proust's Swann's Way in my long form way of reading four pages a day. I hope to be done with Proust by April at this pace. I'm also re-reading Rory Stewart's The Places in Between (hence the Afghanistan reference earlier). I'm also Kindling Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future. I'm sure I'll ruminate on those here down the road.
