All the Pretty Horses
By Cormac McCarthy
Why this book?
All the Pretty Horses was my introduction to Cormac McCarthy. In case you don’t know, the man does not use quotation marks in his dialogue, and I confess, at first I found this so annoying that it actually made me mad. I thought it was pretentious. “I’m Cormac McCarthy, rules of punctuation are beneath me.” But by twenty pages in, I decided the man could be as pretentious as he wanted to be. He backed it up with an amazing, beautifully written story. The book is nostalgic, romantic, and sometimes bleak to the point of being haunting, but there were also places in the book that struck me as so funny, I remember them vividly years later. McCarthy includes a quick side-trip of the characters checking into the wrong hotel room that had me rolling on the floor; it was written with such restraint that the understatement itself became another laugh.
When you buy a book we may earn a small commission.