Cormac McCarthy is so good at making you care deeply about his characters and then keeping you on tenterhooks of dread about what horror of bloodletting he's going to lead them into. Two young boys, John Grady Cole and Lacey Rawlins, decide to leave their homes in Texas and ride to Mexico. Early on, McCarthy sets up a heartwarming friendship between them. And between Cole and his horse. Then they are joined by another boy even younger than they are who is riding an expensive horse. There's alwa...

Set in 1949, between the frontier lands that separate Texas from México, McCarthy introduces the legendary John Grady Cole when he is barely sixteen years of age. Destitute of state and home after his grandfather’s death, the boy starts a journey of personal growth that will bring him face to face with the harsh violence and crudity of life among bandits, cowboys and outlaws. “All the pretty horses” is my first contact with the epic Cormac McCarthy, and even though I can’t deny the rugged artist...

The Border Trilogy – Part 1 of 3His name is John Grady Cole and he is 16 years old. His world shifted and changed radically from what he knew and what he expected while growing up in San Angelos, Texas. He and his best friend Lacey Rawlins (17) decide to ride to Mexico and see if they can find work on a ranch.On their way there, a younger boy, possibly 14 (although he lay claim to 16 years) named Jimmy Blevins joins them, although neither is particularly keen to have the fellow along. For starte...

Despite my great love for The Road, I’d argue that my enjoyment of All the Pretty Horses was far from predetermined. To begin with, I’ve recently been made aware (in discussions with fellow Goodreaders) that I’ve never seen a single Clint Eastwood movie or even a non-Clint Eastwood Western. And although I grew up in the South (sort of), I’m now an East Coast city guy who’s never even gone camping if you don’t count that college freshman orientation trip. Not only do I know jack-shit about horses...

I’m having difficulty writing a cogent review of All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy. I plunged into this author’s work not knowing anything about his writing style. My first impression, after around 10 pages, was – “I have just read some of the WORLD’S longest sentences.” If I had to read them out loud, I would’ve run out of breath. My other observation was the lack of quotation marks, and he said, she said - which really gave me some trouble following who said what in a conversation. Ther...

The hardest books to review are those where my personal pleasure contrasts with my objective assessment. This is such a book. There is much to admire, but I never really enjoyed it, and after a while, it felt like an uncomfortable hack across a barren, albeit sometimes beautiful, landscape. This is a Western, set mostly in Mexico, shortly after WW2. It has all the features you’d expect, told with McCarthy’s harshly poetic prose and minimalist punctuation. There’s also a lot of Spanish vocabulary...

On the surface, this book is a cowboy adventure. A gritty story in which childhood doesn't exist and two teenage boys, John Grady and Lacey Rawlins, are alone riding in a land foreign to them. They speak when they only truly have something worth saying. They sleep under the stars. Their only possessions are often the clothes on their back, a razor and a toothbrush. Oh, and their horses.This life is sometimes idyllic, but more often, dangerous. It becomes complicated when they run into Blevins, a...

Cormac McCarthy, in his 1992 novel, (which begins his Border Trilogy) has again conjured up dark and somber images of the verges of human civilization both literally and metaphorically in Mexico.John Grady Cole and his friend leave 1949 Texas and cross the border into Mexico and in some respects goes back in time as the tone and setting could be a hundred years earlier. Cole works on a horse ranch and then because of his skill with horses is invited into the ranch house where he begins a prohibi...

I read this one a while ago and some of the scenes are still with me. And because of the continual flashes in remembrances I have to put this book into my top five of all time. The prose is lyrical, the characters three dimensional. The scene that comes back to me the most is the one where the two main characters are befriended by a kid down in Mexico All three are detained by the Mexican police and the horse the kid is riding is one he'd stolen. The Mexican police take him off and shoot him whi...

All the Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy, #1), Cormac McCarthyAll the Pretty Horses is a novel by American author Cormac McCarthy published in 1992. Its romanticism (in contrast to the bleakness of McCarthy's earlier work) brought the writer much public attention. It is also the first of McCarthy's "Border Trilogy".The novel tells of John Grady Cole, a 16-year-old who grew up on his grandfather's ranch in San Angelo, Texas. The boy was raised for a significant part of his youth, perhaps 15 of h...

All the Pretty Horses isn’t quite as grim as other Cormac McCarthy work that I’ve read but considering that this includes The Road, Blood Meridian, No Country For Old Men and watching the HBO adaptation of his play The Sunset Limited, it's still so bleak that your average person will be depressed enough to be checked into a mental ward and put on suicide watch after finishing it.John Grady Cole is a sixteen year old cowboy in Texas a few years after World War II who was raised on his grandfather...

What a great writer, I've become a big fan. This is my fourth McCarthy book and I just love his style, his stories, the way he describes desert country...darkness all round, but so good...Does anyone know if McCarthy is still writing? I would love a new book....

My introduction to the fiction of Pulitzer Prize winner and Oprah Winfrey fan Cormac McCarthy is All the Pretty Horses, the first novel in McCarthy's so-called Border Trilogy, published in 1992. Westerns set in the post World War II country between Texas and Mexico, the trilogy continued with The Crossing and Cities of the Plain. The first seventy-five percent of this brooding, terse and darkly mesmerizing ranching tale is glorious, towering over the intersection of storytelling and language. Th...