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“We are all of us ill prepared for what is to come”

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

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I saw the film No Country for Old Men long before I ever read the book, and it is #2 on my list of all-time favorite movies. I’ve read two other books by McCarthy, Blood Meridian (brilliant but a very dense read) and The Road. Now that I’ve read No Country for Old Men, the movie really did the book justice. While I liked the book a lot, it’s one of those rare cases where I think the movie was a little better. Set in […]

I sent one boy to the gaschamber at Huntsville.

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

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This is one of those novels that is in my head as just perfect or near-perfect in execution. That list also includes The Great Gatsby and The Metamorphosis and Heart of Darkness. It may or may have much to say about enjoyment or heights of reading or anything like that but about precision of form and content, and especially economy of language. I define literature in fiction as telling a story in the only possible way. So in this book, and this is a reread for the first […]

They crested out on the bluff in the late afternoon sun with their shadows long on the sawgrass and burnt sedge…

Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy

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This book asks the question: what if we took Lena Grove plot from William Faulkner’s Light in August and made it more grim, grisly, and depressing? This book begins with a girl of 16 giving birth to a child in the Tennessee backwoods. It’s her brother’s child, and after the birth he takes it out to the woods and abandons it. He tells her it died and he buried it, but when she presses him, he tells her he left it. It becomes clear that […]

A Grim Look at the End

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

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Maybe because I caught a nasty summer cold and already feel dreadful but this book just left me sad and in tears. I don’t know what else to say except McCarthy wrote a heart breaking book about the end of the world as we know it following a boy and his father. The book moves pretty quickly and sometimes you may get confused about who is talking (there are no quotes) but the book in the end shows you the worst of humanity and sometimes […]

“He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.”

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This book sat on my shelf for a decade because I was too scared to read it. It’s great, everyone said. It’s great, but it’s heavy. It is both of those things. It’s also, unexpectedly, the best book on fatherhood I’ve ever read. More on that later. Plotwise, The Road is not paving (haha) any new terrain: An apocalyptic event occurred within the last decade, and the survivors are trying to eke out an existence. The main threat isn’t the scarred earth – it’s the other […]



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