All the Pretty Horses

All the Pretty Horses is a privilege to read.

It has the sweeping tone of a grand Western like Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry, with a focus on the grandeur of John Grady's journey across the landscape. McCarthy's metaphors and descriptions are beautiful, like reading poetry. Several scenes - mostly of riding through nature, and especially a romantic scene in a lake - are so pretty I read them several times. It's the most beautiful prose I've read since All The Light We Cannot See. It's both romantic (about a love story) and Romantic (anti-cynical), which is exactly like me; coming from his pitch-black post-apocalyptic novel The Road, this is an entirely different feel. It's also pretty funny at times, which I didn't really expect.

I've heard people compare his writing to As I Lay Dying. Although I happened to like that book in its own right, I think that Hemingway is a better comparison than Faulkner. McCarthy's sentences feel stark and clipped, even though sometimes they run on for a whole paragraph, and he doesn't use much punctuation. But they're never deliberately hard to follow, like some of the character chapters in Faulkner. This is just how McCarthy writes.

Cons: he uses a fair amount of technical language about horses and Spanish. Even though I know very little vocabulary for either, I didn't have a hard time following anything.

I loved this book, and whoever you might be, I think you would too.