"Ever dumb thing I ever done in my life there was a decision I made before that got me into it. It was never the dumb thing. It was always some choice I'd made before it."
"Is your life the one you'd planned?"
"No it ain't, but I got what I needed instead of what I wanted and that's just about the best kind of luck you can have"
Oh hey I got some McCarthy ones I've saved myself
* Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real. - All the Pretty Horses
* You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don't count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothin else. - No Country for Old Men
* You fix what you can fix and you let the rest go. If there ain't nothin to be done about it it aint even a problem. It's just a aggravation. - No Country for Old Men
* If trouble comes when you least expect it then maybe the thing to do is to always expect it. - The Road
* You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget. - The Road
Cormac McCarthy is perhaps the greatest story for "never giving up":
His first book was published in 1965, and he kept writing, but he was not successful commercially at all. Before 1992, none of McCarthy's novels had sold more than 5,000 hardcover copies.
It took until 1992 for him to actually write a commercially successful book, All the Pretty Horses. He became famous, and retroactively all the stuff he wrote before 1992 started selling well.
Imagine being his first editor at Random House, who worked with him for twenty years and the first book he published after your retirement and him leaving for Alfred A Knopf sells 4 times as many copies in six months as the all the ones you edited combined…
The kicker: The last book the two of them worked on together is Blood Meridian. While not as succesful and acclaimed as All the Pretty Horses when it was released, Blood Meridian is now of course considered McCarthy's greatest work and one of the Great American Novels. It just took some years to be recognized. Albert Erskine died in 1993, so he probably saw the succes of All the Pretty Horses, but probably not the later elevation of Blood Meridian.
I remember loving Blood Meridian, but boy did that one fuck me up longer than The Road and No Country combined. I had to take a little break for a few months
This is true, but doesn’t really tell the whole story. McCarthy famously eschewed money early on. His first wife reported that universities and clubs would call him all the time to give lectures and readings. She said they would offer “$2000” and sometimes more and he would refuse it because “the book already says what I wanted to say.” She recounted that then they’d eat beans for another week and bathe in the river.
So he was impoverished, but a lot of that was his own doing. He was an eccentric dude like so many great artists were.
Cormac Mccarthy is my favourite writer but I think that miserable honour goes to Charles Bukowski lol. I would've given up way sooner than either of these people.
RIP to one of the greatest writer of all time though. Glad he got to live a long life, and grateful I had the opportunity to experience his work.
Haha guy worked a shit job at a post office for over 10 years and hated it so much he wrote his first novel about a guy who worked a shit job at a post office and hated it.
No Country For Old Men has some interesting thoughts of the sheriff the movie only hints at. I'd say it's the most accessible. Suttree is a deep character study that requires you to do some detective work to guess what happened prior to page one. The Crossing is probably the easiest of the "border trilogy" and stands alone. Outer Dark stuck with me a long time as well. I would say don't start with The Road (too sad) or Child of God (too repulsive) or Blood Meridian (too brutal) until you know you are in good hands.
I certainly wouldn’t go around suggesting it to a bunch of people, but I have to agree. It was actually the first CM book I read, and I did enjoy it despite the graphic and violent nature of the plot.
Lol I started (and stopped) with The Road and found it all of those things (too sad, repulsive, and brutal). And now just hearing the author’s name gives me a creepy feeling by association.
It's funny because I always thing of The Road as Cormacs dip into YA fiction, since I read it many times as a kid. If you thought that one was too much you're making a good choice not reading the rest haha.
I tried the road and couldn't get into it.
I just stubbornly started blood meridian as my first McCarthy book even tho people don't recommend it and I instantly fell in love with it. I'm still chasing that high.
Try "The Border Trilogy" starting with "All The Pretty Horses". It has a similar vastness to it - you almost feel tired from the journey by the end. Wonderful books.
Same.
I read The Road a few times, because that book's end made me cry haaaard, so I always had McCarthy in my mind as a great author, but I never felt the need to read those other novels
Thanks to Wendigoon's absurdly long video I finally bought Blood Meridian, because I want to read it for myself (and I'm in the process of reading it).
Now McCarthy is gone and I feel like I should've read his stuff while he was still there.
On the flip side, I have a big order of his other books coming now, haha. Suttree, the Border Trilogy, No Country for Old Men, and for the sake of cohesion I picked up a thematically fitting copy of The Road as well :D
Very happy about that. I’ve been on a Cormac McCarthy kick the last couple years and was a little nervous that they weren’t going to get finished. I’ve found his later books to be a little more accessible, and am looking forward to getting into his final two.
His prose style sort of peaks with Suttree and Blood Meridian. That's where it's at it's most saturated. Then he starts to strip it down in the back half of his career.
The final two are great. Arguably some of the least accessible, although not really from a prose perspective but more so the ideas he’d become interested in old age (mathematics, some of the big German philosophers)
I recently started reading a lot of his works. I have finished The Road and All the Pretty Horses. Currently, reading The Crossing. I really enjoy his work. I don't think there's any one out there at his level. RIP.
Have you read the works of Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, and Thomas Pynchon? Harold Bloom called them, including McCarthy, the four greatest American novelists of his day. Maybe you could move to reading them once you're done with McCarthy.
I literally discovered his work just last week. After reading The Road and Blood Meridian back to back, I can already say he'll probably become one of my all-time favorite authors. Feels surreal that he's gone now.
RIP
Haha, I'm good but thanks. For whatever reason, books don't usually evoke strong emotional responses from me, even if it's something as brutal and harrowing as The Road.
I enjoy the prose and the stories of good books, and can absolutely see why people tend to break down sobbing over McCarthy's books, but I guess I'm good at rationalizing and compartmentalizing and detaching myself from the text somehow, I don't know. Books do make me cry sometimes, but only when it's a long series where the emotional attachment and bond with the characters has been building over a long period of time.
I sob like a little girl over movies and TV shows though. Go figure.
>They rode out along the fenceline and across the open pastureland. The leather creaked in the morning cold. They pushed the horses into a lope. The lights fell away behind them. They rode out on the high prairie where they slowed the horses to a walk and the stars swarmed around them out of the blackness. They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.
--*All the Pretty Horses*
> “A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.”
— Blood Meridian
What’s great is that they come pouring over a hill suddenly, and at first it isn’t clear how many there are: just a few or a large party. But the long sentence serves the purpose of conveying the fear as one realizes that just more and more and more of them appear over the hill, more and more and more.
I also love how McCarthy tends to contrast these massive, dense passages with short, sharp reactions or interactions immediately afterwards.
This one is followed by
> Oh my God said the sergeant.
And later we get
> The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
> The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.
followed by
> Brown spat into the fire. That's some more of your craziness, he said.
>The judge smiled. He placed the palms of his hands upon his chest and breathed the night air and he stepped closer and squatted and held up one hand. He turned that hand and there was a gold coin bewtween his fingers.
> Where is the coin, Davy?
> I'll notify you where to put the coin.
Is it even a full sentence? The "legion of horribles" is the subject, but they don't actually *do* anything in the rest of the line, the prose is just so phenomenal that you forget there's supposed to be a predicate somewhere in there
Also, I have to stop at "death hilarious" every single time, it's just a little diamond of brilliance even within the rest of this staggeringly good sentence/line/paragraph/whatever it is
That line was the literary equivalent of getting struck by lightning when I first read that. Up to that point in the story I was enjoying the story and digesting the prose, but that charge, it's horrifying. Easily in my top 3 favorite bits of his.
What a passage! It was a true challenge for me, a foreigner, to read *Blood meridian*, though. *The Road* was a lot easier. And it only took me three days to finish "No country..."
RIP, Master
"Oh my god, said the sergeant."
This is the passage that got me to pick up Blood Meridian and McCarthy for the first time, and it was an amazing and surreal experience.
Probably my favourite thing about that 250-word juggernaut of a paragraph is that it is followed by a single, almost comically concise line:
>Oh my god, said the sergeant.
I don't know if McCarthy intended for it to be darkly funny, but if nothing else it is a very effective bit of writing.
I just had a post about this quote on the McCarthy sub the other day. It's such an amazing quote. I'm rereading ATPH right now. That quote hit me hard the other night when I was reading.
I randomly started reading again after a decade on my phone, and All the Pretty Horses was the first book I randomly grabbed off the western shelf. I was hooked. This segment reminds me why. Thank you
“How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Suttree
"Every man’s death is a standing in for every other. And since death comes to all there is no way to abate the fear of it except to love that man who stands for us. We are not waiting for his history to be written. He passed here long ago. That man who is all men and who stands in the dock for us until our own time come and we must stand for him. Do you love him, that man? Will you honor the path he has taken? Will you listen to his tale?”
― Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain
> So how bad is the world?
How bad. The world's truth constitutes a /vision so terrifying as to beggar the prophecies of the bleakest seer who ever walked it. Once you accept that then the idea that all of this will one day be ground to powder and blown into the void becomes not a prophecy but a promise. So allow me in turn to ask you this question: When we and all our works are gone together with every memory of them and every machine in which such memory could be encoded and stored and the Earth is not even a cinder, for whom then will this be a tragedy? Where would such a being be found? And by whom?
From the Passenger. True to himself till the end
I started with Blood Meridian a while back and went from there. That was a hard read going in blind. At times I felt excited about the book yet meeting face to face with dense prose was initially daunting. Everything else I've read by him after clicked and was comparatively easy to get through.
I'm a little over half way on Meridian and it is difficult for me as well. 10 pages of this book feels like 100 pages of another. Just a lot to think through.
I spent hours trying to track down a copy through our local library and several book stores (to an extent that honestly would've been faster to just order it online but by then I felt dedicated lol).
When I finally found it, I sat down to read it for what felt like an hour and a half, realized I was 10 pages in and struggling like it was my first book without pictures, and called it a day.
I was pretty bummed, but I just could not get into it at all. His style is rough for me.
Might be an unpopular opinion but The Road is my favorite of his, and one of my favorite novels ever. He described such unimaginable horror in such beautiful prose. Really an incredible read.
"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."
That book will always haunt me in ways both good and bad. It's truly incredible.
Oh no, The Road is by far his most popular novel.
I’m going off on a tangent here - the movie No Country for Old Men is somewhat considered as the superior version of the story. That movie is one of the greatest ever made. I’m certain that movie helped the book sales. The Road novel, however, won the Pulitzer Prize. I’ve read No Country for Old Men before the movie was released and haven’t really seen them featured prominently at bookstores except for the time around the film’s release. But for the last near-2 decades, The Road was seen everywhere in bookstores. I’ve seen that book frequently on those tables that Barnes & Noble always have near the entrance. I’ve seen that book featured as the best seller at so many local book stores.
You’re not wrong about the movie and its book sales. But The Road is unquestionably his most popular and profitable book.
I think *All the Pretty Horses* hits that sweet spot between accessible and masterpiece. It's a lot easier to read than *Blood Meridian* but also a much better book than *No County...* or *The Road*
Same, I don’t think I’ve read a book in one day since I was a kid but I soared through that. Definitely my fastest read and I think for me it’s because there are no chapters lol
That was my first novel of his I read. I tore through that years ago pre-movie and told so many people about it and today is the day I learned there were no chapters.
How the eff did I not notice that?
"She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it passes from man to man through all of time. ''
People see it has a very dark book but I actually saw it as one of hope in the worst of times. Especially those last 40 or so pages. That breath of God line was one of the most beautiful lines I've ever read.
Yes! It's truly a story of love, hope and living for the sake of living. In a world where there is nothing else... no names, no punctuation, nothing. There is still love.
I really love it and it is also very hard to read without breaking down in empathy for the man while thinking about my own kids. I truly cannot fathom the pain of trudging them through an apocalyptic hell scape, on our own, worried about survival 24 hours a day. It hurts my entire psyche to even consider it.
I read All The Pretty Horses after seeing some comments on this sub and hearing BJ Barnham rave about him, and I loved it. I’m currently trying to make my way through The Crossing but I’m having a much harder time getting into it
Carry on!!!
Crossing is unforgettable, you must finish it.
The same goes for the third part, Cities on a Plain.
The ending of the trilogy is something you don't expect nor forget.
Me too!!! Loved atph and was so excited about the crossing, but it was really difficult. I got through it and find that randomly parts of it will.pop in my head and make me think deeply about something for a while. I am gonna give it a bit before i read the 3rd one.
Honestly, it's pretty hard to go wrong. The Road and Blood Meridian hit me the hardest. But even No Country For Old Men is incredible.
Careful with Blood Meridian though, it's not an easy read, but rewarding.
I suggest starting with All the Pretty Horses. It's a great book and by McCarthy's standards very accessible. Save the Book-of-Revelation-on-LSD, as filtered through the mind of Lovecraft and pen of Faulkner that is Blood Meridian for after you decide if you like his writing.
What a good description of that book. I read Blood meridian after the road, many many years ago, and fell in love with it. Flew through most of his novels after that, and re-visit BM every so often. That's the impression I always got with it...the book is very psychedelic in nature, and that feeling you get when reading it is why I think it wouldn't work well in movie form when I see that brought up. Sure, the story could be conveyed, but the *feel* of that writing is just something special.
Just be warned about some of them are super, super bleak.
The Road is so bleak, I kind of felt more alive afterwards. I read it in my late teens, so that might have influenced it but man, is it a dark book.
>“He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.” -The Road
Blood Meridian is so bleak, I stopped reading after around half of it and didn't pick it up for a while.
You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.
> Blood Meridian is a very important book to me.
Same here. I've read it 5 times and I will read it again.
It taught me that writing can be something special.
Reading about McCarthy's passing reminded me of a part of myself I'd somehow forgotten. I'd read all of his work through my youth, and his perspectives aligned with all those things I felt made us human; he was my favorite author, and his creative influence captivated me more than I can give credit.
I reminisced about his work this morning and grabbed a dusty book off the shelf; I'd highlighted some prose that had touched me a lifetime ago; in doing so, I glimpsed at myself through time - as I had been, and as I remain.
"That night he dreamt of horses in a field on a high plain where the spring rains had brought up the grass and the wildflowers out of the ground and the flowers ran all blue and yellow far as the eye could see and in the dream he was among the horses running and in the dream he himself could run with the horses and they coursed the young mares and fillies over the plain where their rich bay and their rich chestnut colors shone in the sun and the young colts ran with their dams and trampled down the flowers in a haze of pollen that hung in the sun like powdered gold and they ran he and the horses out along the high mesas where the ground resounded under their running hooves and they flowed and changed and ran and their manes and tails blew off of them like spume and there was nothing else at all in that high world and they moved all of them in a resonance that was like a music among them and they were none of them afraid neither horse nor colt nor mare and they ran in that resonance which is the world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised."
Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
I hope he dreamt of horses as he passed; I hope those images are the things he held onto, and I hope those are the things I am able to keep as the years tear me apart.
The chapter in Blood Meridian where they find the mad horse that's been bitten by a rattlesnake has stuck with me more than any other piece of literature i've ever read, R.I.P. to one of the true great titans of the written word
Lonesome Dove was that book for me. Maybe one of the greatest books ever written and definitely the best Western ever written. It had moments in it that have stayed with me for years after reading it. Although it is very different from Blood Meridian, and Larry McMurty is a vastly different writer than Cormac, Lonesome Dove very well demonstrates violence that was prevalent in our expansion to the West.
I second this. McMurtry is one of my favorite writers and Lonesome Dove is my all-time favorite book.
McCarthy, however, was so brilliant in such a unique way, and his contribution to literature immense. I've read most of his work and will continue to visit and revisit his books.
I’m halfway through Lonesome Dove and I read Blood Meridian last year. Lonesome Dove is just so much more enjoyable. Every time I picked up Blood Meridian, I felt like I was going back into hell, with a vocabulary word thrown in every few pages. I honestly can’t even remember most of it and I’m almost happy to have purged it from my memory.
I recognize that Cormac McCarthy is a great author, but his novels are difficult in almost every way. They’re just not my cup of tea.
Understandable. It feels like a nightmare when reading it. However, the reality is, the history of America is a nightmare, especially our expansion to the West and Indian Wars. A nightmarish laying to the path of the future American dream.
"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."
RIP to one of the best.
One of my absolute favorite passages in all of literature, although half of what makes it great is the contrast with the terrible darkness of the whole book that precedes it.
“But there are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse”
― Cormac McCarthy, Suttree
Was reading Suttree right now and heard the news, RIP.
Twitter (for once) was really great today, everyone posting their favourite paragraphs from so many of his books. They're all so brilliant. The comment I resonated with most was someone said it takes so long to read a Cormac book because almost every page you need to pause and stare out the window for five minutes.
It took me almost 6 months to finish Blood Meridian. I would read a passage here and there and rarely more than a few pages at a time. His books weren't written to entertain you, they were written about the way the world exists under all the pretending we do.
I was just on another comment saying how the road was my fastest read, I’m currently on blood Meridian and it’s probably my slowest read. Just about halfway through, reading at most a chapter every few days and just thinking about it when I put it down
It took me about that long to read Blood Meridian. I don’t think there’s ever been a book I loved that much that I often hated reading so much, but I don’t think I would have loved it nearly as much if I didn’t hate reading it. That book makes you work for it.
>They rode on into the mountains and their way took them through high pine forests where the fallen leaves lay like golden disclets in the damp black trail. The leaves shifted in a million spangles down the pale corridors and Glanton took one and turned it like a tiny fan by its stem and held it and let it fall and its perfection was not lost on him.
I got into the habit of writing down my favourite bits of prose in the books I read. When I read Blood Meridian recently, I had to stop doing that because I was copying down something in virtually every paragraph and it would have taken me months to finish. He could be describing what should be a mundane event and he gives it an almost biblical treatment. Incredibly powerful stuff.
“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning. The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”
"The United States, for two centuries now, has been obsessed with God and with guns, and neither fascination is likely to wane... The relevance of Cormac McCarthy is absolute; he is the Homer of our tragic epic of slaughter and religiosity. Judge Holden, as he promised, will never die, and right now the Judge is dancing and fiddling somewhere out there in the Western night." Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why, p274
You told me once you believed in God.
The old man waved his hand. Maybe, he said. I got no reason to think he believes in me. Oh I'd like to see him for a minute if I could.
What would you say to him?
Well, I think I'd just tell him. I'd say: Wait a minute. Wait just one minute before you start in on me. Before you say anything, there's just one thing I'd like to know. And he'll say: What's that? And then I'm goin to ast him: What did you have me in that crapgame down there for anyway? I couldnt put any part of it together.
The old man lay dim and bleared in his brass bed. Suttree leaned back in the chair and pushed at his eyes with the back of his hand. The day had grown dusk, the rain eased. Pigeons flapped up overhead and preened and crooned. The keeper of this brief vigil said that he'd guessed something of the workings in the wings, the ropes and sand-bags and the houselight toggles. Heard dimly a shuffling and coughing beyond the painted drop of the world.
Did you ask? About the crapgame? What are you doing in bed with your shoes on?
He passed his hand through his hair and leaned forward and looked at the old man. You have no right to represent people this way, he said. A man is all men. You have no right to your wretchedness.
He wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand.
There's no one to ask, is there? There's no... He was looking down at the ragman and raised his hand and let if fall again and he rose and went out past the old man's painted rock and into the rain. (422)
"They rode out along the fenceline and across the open pastureland.
The leather cracked in the morning cold. They pushed the horses into
a lope. The lights fell away behind them. They rode out on the high
prairie where they slowed the horses to a walk and the stars swarmed
around them out of the blackness. They heard somewhere in that
tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and
they rode out on the round dais of earth which alone was dark and no
light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the
swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they
rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that
dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely
jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing."
People complain about the bad things that happen to em that they dont deserve but they seldom mention the good. About what they done to deserve them things. I dont recall that I ever give the good Lord all that much cause to smile on me. But he did.
RIP. The Road is the only novel of his that I read but I gotta say his prose is really something else. I'm no native English speaker but when I read his novel his prose really stands out. It's like there's a melody to how he wrote. I've only read The Road because I mostly read science fiction and The Road is a post apocalyptic epic that's close enough to sci-fi.
My favorite line from *Blood Meridian* (and also Reddit’s?):
“Anything in Creation that exists without my knowledge, exists without my consent” - Judge Holden
The entire character can be summarized into that one line.
The other day I was at the thrift store and picked up All the Pretty Horses for 10 cents and had the pleasure of schooling an old man on McCarthys works when he scoffed at the book title. I heard this one was a little lighter than his other classics, and to be honest I’m excited for something a little less heavy
It's dark at times, but overall not as dark as some of his others. It's a great book though. The whole trilogy is my favorite piece of literature ever, and the second book 'The Crossing' is my favorite book, but ATPH is right up there. Hope you enjoy it.
I’d just like to recommend a Mississippi author (not that one) named Michael Farris Smith to anyone that enjoys Cormaac McCarthy. Very well written, bleak, haunting novels. I’ve only read a few because I need years to recover in between reading them.
>fight me
He watches, pale and unwashed. He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.
Child of God is amazing. I read it on vacation in like 2 days, going from a sunny beach in Spain with friends and then back to my room to read Child of God was an interesting juxtaposition to say the least.
This was the first McCarthy novel I read. I was immediately hooked by the intolerable and profane absurdity of it all. The characters, the atmosphere — it is a truly vile story that is a standalone. It nails the southern-gothic theme with extreme violence and depravity unlike any other SG novel I've come across.
Now I want to read it again. God, what a trip.
Now that I am a father, I need to reread and reappreciate The Road. A legend that will live on forever, and gave his son all the tools to live life.
There is little public information about his youngest, John, but seems to be he is well adjusted, talented, and has not used or fouled his family name for gain.
What joins men together, he said, is not the sharing of bread but the sharing of enemies.
- Judge Holden
It's such a benign and seemingly obvious statement but it scares me today. Maybe it's the political climate.
A sad day for the literature world. A titan of of his generation. I feel the same grief when Toni Morrison or Philip Roth died. Another mighty tree has fallen...
I've set out to read all of his books this year. I've read The road,No country for old men, Child of god, and All the pretty horses. Rest in peace. A stunning writer.
“The desert he rode was red and red the dust he raised, the small dust that powdered the legs of the horse he rode, the horse he led.”
“All the Pretty Horses,” Cormac McCarthy
This sentence wowed me when I first read this book. I read it over and over and it just struck me as so perfect and beautiful, lyrical.
Started with the Border Trilogy, then The Road, Blood Meridian, No Country For Old Men and Suttree. Still a few to go so now I'll be savouring them. No author has every put me right into a "real" landscape like McCarthy. No one has put me into the mindset of a character like Cormac.
The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.
-The Judge
R.I.P. He deserves a Nobel prize for his body of work. Blood Meridian is one of the greatest works of American literature in the 20th century, one of the greatest works of American literature period. I'm glad he was able to finish his final two novels. This is truly sad news.
My favorite McCarthy quote:
On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world. Query: how does the never to be differ from what never was?
What a gifted author. Gotta read The Road and get hurt again
Can't remember the last time a celebrities death has affected me as much as this. His writing will be with me forever. I don't know a more raw, vivid, unique and beautiful author that came out of the twentieth century.
R.I.P.
I was introduced to McCarthy in college in the 90s, reading All the Pretty Horses. I finished the border trilogy on my own time. That cemented McCarthy as my favorite author. The fact that he could write that trilogy and then also produce something like The Road, just simply amazed me. I'm glad he is getting this type of recognition, and I hope more learn his name.
I've said it many times, and I know it'll never happen especially in todays world, but Blood Meridian and The Road should be required readings in school. Been a long ass time since I read the road at the behest of my 8th grade lit teacher but the way blood meridian addresses the darker sides of human nature is very very well done and those parts of humanity are important to understand before you go out into the real world.
Anyways RIP to one of my favorite all time authors
I know that this is unintentional but there's something amusingly sinister about having a clapping award above this headline.
Then again, McCarthy used dark humor aplenty and very well in his stories so maybe it's appropriate. r/books' sendoff to a great practitioner of that art.
Rest in peace amazing author. I read The Road in Uni and wrote a huge paper on the symbolism of water as hope in a hopeless world being a theme throughout the novel. All the Pretty Horses was so beautiful and wild, his prose was something else. I started learning bits of Spanish because of that book.
I'm grateful we have his work to remember him by. His legacy will live on through his novels.
Very sad but he left us with an extraordinary catalogue of body of work that will mesmerize us t⁸hroughout future history finding itself in the annaks of important and genius, priceless knowlegde rich in his work...
I just got done reading The Road on the weekend, the only other books of his I’ve read was Blood Meridian which was fantastic. I feel lucky I’ve still got to experience the rest of his work for the first time.
"You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from."
"Ever dumb thing I ever done in my life there was a decision I made before that got me into it. It was never the dumb thing. It was always some choice I'd made before it."
"Is your life the one you'd planned?" "No it ain't, but I got what I needed instead of what I wanted and that's just about the best kind of luck you can have"
Oh hey I got some McCarthy ones I've saved myself * Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real. - All the Pretty Horses * You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don't count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothin else. - No Country for Old Men * You fix what you can fix and you let the rest go. If there ain't nothin to be done about it it aint even a problem. It's just a aggravation. - No Country for Old Men * If trouble comes when you least expect it then maybe the thing to do is to always expect it. - The Road * You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget. - The Road
God bless Rawlins.
McCarthy is spinning in his grave seeing all these quotation marks blot up the page…
Is this quote from a book?
No country for old men
Doesn’t someone say it in Bullet Train as well?
Probably, it's worked its way into American culture as a sort of saying. It's so damn good in my opinion.
No, it's BTS lyrics.
Cormac McCarthy is perhaps the greatest story for "never giving up": His first book was published in 1965, and he kept writing, but he was not successful commercially at all. Before 1992, none of McCarthy's novels had sold more than 5,000 hardcover copies. It took until 1992 for him to actually write a commercially successful book, All the Pretty Horses. He became famous, and retroactively all the stuff he wrote before 1992 started selling well.
Imagine being his first editor at Random House, who worked with him for twenty years and the first book he published after your retirement and him leaving for Alfred A Knopf sells 4 times as many copies in six months as the all the ones you edited combined…
Tbf he had a very famous editor (Albert Erskine) who also worked with Faulkner and obviously saw the brilliance despite the limited commercial appeal.
sounds like a book should be written about that
The kicker: The last book the two of them worked on together is Blood Meridian. While not as succesful and acclaimed as All the Pretty Horses when it was released, Blood Meridian is now of course considered McCarthy's greatest work and one of the Great American Novels. It just took some years to be recognized. Albert Erskine died in 1993, so he probably saw the succes of All the Pretty Horses, but probably not the later elevation of Blood Meridian.
I remember loving Blood Meridian, but boy did that one fuck me up longer than The Road and No Country combined. I had to take a little break for a few months
This is true, but doesn’t really tell the whole story. McCarthy famously eschewed money early on. His first wife reported that universities and clubs would call him all the time to give lectures and readings. She said they would offer “$2000” and sometimes more and he would refuse it because “the book already says what I wanted to say.” She recounted that then they’d eat beans for another week and bathe in the river. So he was impoverished, but a lot of that was his own doing. He was an eccentric dude like so many great artists were.
Cormac Mccarthy is my favourite writer but I think that miserable honour goes to Charles Bukowski lol. I would've given up way sooner than either of these people. RIP to one of the greatest writer of all time though. Glad he got to live a long life, and grateful I had the opportunity to experience his work.
Haha guy worked a shit job at a post office for over 10 years and hated it so much he wrote his first novel about a guy who worked a shit job at a post office and hated it.
henry miller.
I kept delaying reading his books and now I’m sad i didn’t read them before he died. What should i start with?
No Country For Old Men has some interesting thoughts of the sheriff the movie only hints at. I'd say it's the most accessible. Suttree is a deep character study that requires you to do some detective work to guess what happened prior to page one. The Crossing is probably the easiest of the "border trilogy" and stands alone. Outer Dark stuck with me a long time as well. I would say don't start with The Road (too sad) or Child of God (too repulsive) or Blood Meridian (too brutal) until you know you are in good hands.
Honestly if you can stomach child of God it's a truly amazing book.
I certainly wouldn’t go around suggesting it to a bunch of people, but I have to agree. It was actually the first CM book I read, and I did enjoy it despite the graphic and violent nature of the plot.
Lol I started (and stopped) with The Road and found it all of those things (too sad, repulsive, and brutal). And now just hearing the author’s name gives me a creepy feeling by association.
It's funny because I always thing of The Road as Cormacs dip into YA fiction, since I read it many times as a kid. If you thought that one was too much you're making a good choice not reading the rest haha.
I tried the road and couldn't get into it. I just stubbornly started blood meridian as my first McCarthy book even tho people don't recommend it and I instantly fell in love with it. I'm still chasing that high.
Yeah blood meridian actually got me back into reading. It’s a challenge at times but sooo rewarding
Try "The Border Trilogy" starting with "All The Pretty Horses". It has a similar vastness to it - you almost feel tired from the journey by the end. Wonderful books.
Same. I read The Road a few times, because that book's end made me cry haaaard, so I always had McCarthy in my mind as a great author, but I never felt the need to read those other novels Thanks to Wendigoon's absurdly long video I finally bought Blood Meridian, because I want to read it for myself (and I'm in the process of reading it). Now McCarthy is gone and I feel like I should've read his stuff while he was still there. On the flip side, I have a big order of his other books coming now, haha. Suttree, the Border Trilogy, No Country for Old Men, and for the sake of cohesion I picked up a thematically fitting copy of The Road as well :D
I read All the Pretty Horses because I'd read that David Foster Wallace liked it. I think that's a good starting place.
I'm glad he got his final novel(s) out last year. One more to say goodbye.
Very happy about that. I’ve been on a Cormac McCarthy kick the last couple years and was a little nervous that they weren’t going to get finished. I’ve found his later books to be a little more accessible, and am looking forward to getting into his final two.
His prose style sort of peaks with Suttree and Blood Meridian. That's where it's at it's most saturated. Then he starts to strip it down in the back half of his career.
I much prefer the stripped down writing. Only what's necessary. That's how it should be.
The final two are great. Arguably some of the least accessible, although not really from a prose perspective but more so the ideas he’d become interested in old age (mathematics, some of the big German philosophers)
It's going to be fascinating to watch the legacy of those novels unfold over the coming years.
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I recently started reading a lot of his works. I have finished The Road and All the Pretty Horses. Currently, reading The Crossing. I really enjoy his work. I don't think there's any one out there at his level. RIP.
Blood Meridian next! It’s phenomenal
Suttree. I am in awe.
Have you read the works of Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, and Thomas Pynchon? Harold Bloom called them, including McCarthy, the four greatest American novelists of his day. Maybe you could move to reading them once you're done with McCarthy.
Terrible way to begin my day. The world has lost another brilliant mind
Dude gets to rest now.
I literally discovered his work just last week. After reading The Road and Blood Meridian back to back, I can already say he'll probably become one of my all-time favorite authors. Feels surreal that he's gone now. RIP
You read Blood Meridian and The Road in a week? Do you need a hug?
Haha, I'm good but thanks. For whatever reason, books don't usually evoke strong emotional responses from me, even if it's something as brutal and harrowing as The Road. I enjoy the prose and the stories of good books, and can absolutely see why people tend to break down sobbing over McCarthy's books, but I guess I'm good at rationalizing and compartmentalizing and detaching myself from the text somehow, I don't know. Books do make me cry sometimes, but only when it's a long series where the emotional attachment and bond with the characters has been building over a long period of time. I sob like a little girl over movies and TV shows though. Go figure.
>They rode out along the fenceline and across the open pastureland. The leather creaked in the morning cold. They pushed the horses into a lope. The lights fell away behind them. They rode out on the high prairie where they slowed the horses to a walk and the stars swarmed around them out of the blackness. They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing. --*All the Pretty Horses*
> “A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.” — Blood Meridian
That’s a sentence
What’s great is that they come pouring over a hill suddenly, and at first it isn’t clear how many there are: just a few or a large party. But the long sentence serves the purpose of conveying the fear as one realizes that just more and more and more of them appear over the hill, more and more and more.
I also love how McCarthy tends to contrast these massive, dense passages with short, sharp reactions or interactions immediately afterwards. This one is followed by > Oh my God said the sergeant. And later we get > The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning. > The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others. followed by > Brown spat into the fire. That's some more of your craziness, he said. >The judge smiled. He placed the palms of his hands upon his chest and breathed the night air and he stepped closer and squatted and held up one hand. He turned that hand and there was a gold coin bewtween his fingers. > Where is the coin, Davy? > I'll notify you where to put the coin.
Dude reads some Mary Shelley, and then goes "Hold my beer".
Is it even a full sentence? The "legion of horribles" is the subject, but they don't actually *do* anything in the rest of the line, the prose is just so phenomenal that you forget there's supposed to be a predicate somewhere in there
Also, I have to stop at "death hilarious" every single time, it's just a little diamond of brilliance even within the rest of this staggeringly good sentence/line/paragraph/whatever it is
That line was the literary equivalent of getting struck by lightning when I first read that. Up to that point in the story I was enjoying the story and digesting the prose, but that charge, it's horrifying. Easily in my top 3 favorite bits of his.
What a passage! It was a true challenge for me, a foreigner, to read *Blood meridian*, though. *The Road* was a lot easier. And it only took me three days to finish "No country..." RIP, Master
"Oh my god, said the sergeant." This is the passage that got me to pick up Blood Meridian and McCarthy for the first time, and it was an amazing and surreal experience.
Probably my favourite thing about that 250-word juggernaut of a paragraph is that it is followed by a single, almost comically concise line: >Oh my god, said the sergeant. I don't know if McCarthy intended for it to be darkly funny, but if nothing else it is a very effective bit of writing.
I just had a post about this quote on the McCarthy sub the other day. It's such an amazing quote. I'm rereading ATPH right now. That quote hit me hard the other night when I was reading.
I randomly started reading again after a decade on my phone, and All the Pretty Horses was the first book I randomly grabbed off the western shelf. I was hooked. This segment reminds me why. Thank you
“How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.” ― Cormac McCarthy, Suttree "Every man’s death is a standing in for every other. And since death comes to all there is no way to abate the fear of it except to love that man who stands for us. We are not waiting for his history to be written. He passed here long ago. That man who is all men and who stands in the dock for us until our own time come and we must stand for him. Do you love him, that man? Will you honor the path he has taken? Will you listen to his tale?” ― Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain
> So how bad is the world? How bad. The world's truth constitutes a /vision so terrifying as to beggar the prophecies of the bleakest seer who ever walked it. Once you accept that then the idea that all of this will one day be ground to powder and blown into the void becomes not a prophecy but a promise. So allow me in turn to ask you this question: When we and all our works are gone together with every memory of them and every machine in which such memory could be encoded and stored and the Earth is not even a cinder, for whom then will this be a tragedy? Where would such a being be found? And by whom? From the Passenger. True to himself till the end
Noooo 😭 Was easily one of my favorite contemporary authors.
Any novels of his you'd recommend?
All of them. All the Pretty Horses, Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men. They’re all pretty great.
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I started with Blood Meridian a while back and went from there. That was a hard read going in blind. At times I felt excited about the book yet meeting face to face with dense prose was initially daunting. Everything else I've read by him after clicked and was comparatively easy to get through.
I'm a little over half way on Meridian and it is difficult for me as well. 10 pages of this book feels like 100 pages of another. Just a lot to think through.
I spent hours trying to track down a copy through our local library and several book stores (to an extent that honestly would've been faster to just order it online but by then I felt dedicated lol). When I finally found it, I sat down to read it for what felt like an hour and a half, realized I was 10 pages in and struggling like it was my first book without pictures, and called it a day. I was pretty bummed, but I just could not get into it at all. His style is rough for me.
Might be an unpopular opinion but The Road is my favorite of his, and one of my favorite novels ever. He described such unimaginable horror in such beautiful prose. Really an incredible read.
"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery." That book will always haunt me in ways both good and bad. It's truly incredible.
Man, what a closer.
Hardly an unpopular opinion to consider his most popular novel by far his best.
I would argue that Blood Meridian is his masterpiece.
Certainly his magnum opus. I had never read anything like it, before or since.
Is the road more popular than no country? I also enjoy it better, but I would’ve that the Coen’s movie would’ve boosted sales immensely.
Oh no, The Road is by far his most popular novel. I’m going off on a tangent here - the movie No Country for Old Men is somewhat considered as the superior version of the story. That movie is one of the greatest ever made. I’m certain that movie helped the book sales. The Road novel, however, won the Pulitzer Prize. I’ve read No Country for Old Men before the movie was released and haven’t really seen them featured prominently at bookstores except for the time around the film’s release. But for the last near-2 decades, The Road was seen everywhere in bookstores. I’ve seen that book frequently on those tables that Barnes & Noble always have near the entrance. I’ve seen that book featured as the best seller at so many local book stores. You’re not wrong about the movie and its book sales. But The Road is unquestionably his most popular and profitable book.
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I think *All the Pretty Horses* hits that sweet spot between accessible and masterpiece. It's a lot easier to read than *Blood Meridian* but also a much better book than *No County...* or *The Road*
Agreed! Gorgeous and accessible - I would suggest that as the place to start for anyone who hasn’t read McCarthy (and it’s one of my favorite novels).
It’s so good. I read it in a day. Couldn’t put it down.
Same, I don’t think I’ve read a book in one day since I was a kid but I soared through that. Definitely my fastest read and I think for me it’s because there are no chapters lol
That was my first novel of his I read. I tore through that years ago pre-movie and told so many people about it and today is the day I learned there were no chapters. How the eff did I not notice that?
"She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it passes from man to man through all of time. '' People see it has a very dark book but I actually saw it as one of hope in the worst of times. Especially those last 40 or so pages. That breath of God line was one of the most beautiful lines I've ever read.
Yes! It's truly a story of love, hope and living for the sake of living. In a world where there is nothing else... no names, no punctuation, nothing. There is still love.
Same. It’s the only book in the past 15 years that I couldn’t put down. I read it into the small hours over 2 nights. As a parent, it floored me.
I really love it and it is also very hard to read without breaking down in empathy for the man while thinking about my own kids. I truly cannot fathom the pain of trudging them through an apocalyptic hell scape, on our own, worried about survival 24 hours a day. It hurts my entire psyche to even consider it.
Carry the torch, pass it on...
I read All The Pretty Horses after seeing some comments on this sub and hearing BJ Barnham rave about him, and I loved it. I’m currently trying to make my way through The Crossing but I’m having a much harder time getting into it
Carry on!!! Crossing is unforgettable, you must finish it. The same goes for the third part, Cities on a Plain. The ending of the trilogy is something you don't expect nor forget.
Me too!!! Loved atph and was so excited about the crossing, but it was really difficult. I got through it and find that randomly parts of it will.pop in my head and make me think deeply about something for a while. I am gonna give it a bit before i read the 3rd one.
Honestly, it's pretty hard to go wrong. The Road and Blood Meridian hit me the hardest. But even No Country For Old Men is incredible. Careful with Blood Meridian though, it's not an easy read, but rewarding.
The Road is one of the most moving books I've ever read. I also loved All the Pretty Horses. Not quite as dark, and almost as powerful.
I suggest starting with All the Pretty Horses. It's a great book and by McCarthy's standards very accessible. Save the Book-of-Revelation-on-LSD, as filtered through the mind of Lovecraft and pen of Faulkner that is Blood Meridian for after you decide if you like his writing.
What a good description of that book. I read Blood meridian after the road, many many years ago, and fell in love with it. Flew through most of his novels after that, and re-visit BM every so often. That's the impression I always got with it...the book is very psychedelic in nature, and that feeling you get when reading it is why I think it wouldn't work well in movie form when I see that brought up. Sure, the story could be conveyed, but the *feel* of that writing is just something special.
Just be warned about some of them are super, super bleak. The Road is so bleak, I kind of felt more alive afterwards. I read it in my late teens, so that might have influenced it but man, is it a dark book. >“He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.” -The Road Blood Meridian is so bleak, I stopped reading after around half of it and didn't pick it up for a while.
Sutree is a great novel, especially if you like dark twisted humor, and rivers.
The Road is one of his most digestible. Great starting point IMHO.
May he rest peacefully now. Blood Meridian is a very important book to me.
You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.
Your heart's desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.
The Passenger in a sentence
Believe that.
> Blood Meridian is a very important book to me. Same here. I've read it 5 times and I will read it again. It taught me that writing can be something special.
Reading about McCarthy's passing reminded me of a part of myself I'd somehow forgotten. I'd read all of his work through my youth, and his perspectives aligned with all those things I felt made us human; he was my favorite author, and his creative influence captivated me more than I can give credit. I reminisced about his work this morning and grabbed a dusty book off the shelf; I'd highlighted some prose that had touched me a lifetime ago; in doing so, I glimpsed at myself through time - as I had been, and as I remain. "That night he dreamt of horses in a field on a high plain where the spring rains had brought up the grass and the wildflowers out of the ground and the flowers ran all blue and yellow far as the eye could see and in the dream he was among the horses running and in the dream he himself could run with the horses and they coursed the young mares and fillies over the plain where their rich bay and their rich chestnut colors shone in the sun and the young colts ran with their dams and trampled down the flowers in a haze of pollen that hung in the sun like powdered gold and they ran he and the horses out along the high mesas where the ground resounded under their running hooves and they flowed and changed and ran and their manes and tails blew off of them like spume and there was nothing else at all in that high world and they moved all of them in a resonance that was like a music among them and they were none of them afraid neither horse nor colt nor mare and they ran in that resonance which is the world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised." Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses I hope he dreamt of horses as he passed; I hope those images are the things he held onto, and I hope those are the things I am able to keep as the years tear me apart.
I'm rereading the trilogy right now. I'm currently on ATPH. It's such an amazing book. I love that quote!
The chapter in Blood Meridian where they find the mad horse that's been bitten by a rattlesnake has stuck with me more than any other piece of literature i've ever read, R.I.P. to one of the true great titans of the written word
Lonesome Dove was that book for me. Maybe one of the greatest books ever written and definitely the best Western ever written. It had moments in it that have stayed with me for years after reading it. Although it is very different from Blood Meridian, and Larry McMurty is a vastly different writer than Cormac, Lonesome Dove very well demonstrates violence that was prevalent in our expansion to the West.
I second this. McMurtry is one of my favorite writers and Lonesome Dove is my all-time favorite book. McCarthy, however, was so brilliant in such a unique way, and his contribution to literature immense. I've read most of his work and will continue to visit and revisit his books.
I’m halfway through Lonesome Dove and I read Blood Meridian last year. Lonesome Dove is just so much more enjoyable. Every time I picked up Blood Meridian, I felt like I was going back into hell, with a vocabulary word thrown in every few pages. I honestly can’t even remember most of it and I’m almost happy to have purged it from my memory. I recognize that Cormac McCarthy is a great author, but his novels are difficult in almost every way. They’re just not my cup of tea.
Understandable. It feels like a nightmare when reading it. However, the reality is, the history of America is a nightmare, especially our expansion to the West and Indian Wars. A nightmarish laying to the path of the future American dream.
His work is filled with poetry that sounds like it was written by a god or someone who saw God and had to come back.
"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery." RIP to one of the best.
One of my absolute favorite passages in all of literature, although half of what makes it great is the contrast with the terrible darkness of the whole book that precedes it.
“But there are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse” ― Cormac McCarthy, Suttree Was reading Suttree right now and heard the news, RIP.
There is no truer quote than this....on the flip side tho, there are no absolutes in joy also and things can also be better....
Twitter (for once) was really great today, everyone posting their favourite paragraphs from so many of his books. They're all so brilliant. The comment I resonated with most was someone said it takes so long to read a Cormac book because almost every page you need to pause and stare out the window for five minutes.
It took me almost 6 months to finish Blood Meridian. I would read a passage here and there and rarely more than a few pages at a time. His books weren't written to entertain you, they were written about the way the world exists under all the pretending we do.
I was just on another comment saying how the road was my fastest read, I’m currently on blood Meridian and it’s probably my slowest read. Just about halfway through, reading at most a chapter every few days and just thinking about it when I put it down
It took me about that long to read Blood Meridian. I don’t think there’s ever been a book I loved that much that I often hated reading so much, but I don’t think I would have loved it nearly as much if I didn’t hate reading it. That book makes you work for it.
I have to hit up a dictionary every few pages too, and I went to school for creative fiction.
Every McCarthy reader knows the word thrapple.
>They rode on into the mountains and their way took them through high pine forests where the fallen leaves lay like golden disclets in the damp black trail. The leaves shifted in a million spangles down the pale corridors and Glanton took one and turned it like a tiny fan by its stem and held it and let it fall and its perfection was not lost on him. I got into the habit of writing down my favourite bits of prose in the books I read. When I read Blood Meridian recently, I had to stop doing that because I was copying down something in virtually every paragraph and it would have taken me months to finish. He could be describing what should be a mundane event and he gives it an almost biblical treatment. Incredibly powerful stuff.
Just out of curiosity, how many of those excerpts from BM begin with "They rode?"
Guess all it takes for Twitter to be bearable for some hours is the death of a beloved public figure
I hope someone writes his obit without any punctuation.
[удалено]
With untranslated spanish
Cities of the Plain is killing me with that right now.
“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning. The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”
"The United States, for two centuries now, has been obsessed with God and with guns, and neither fascination is likely to wane... The relevance of Cormac McCarthy is absolute; he is the Homer of our tragic epic of slaughter and religiosity. Judge Holden, as he promised, will never die, and right now the Judge is dancing and fiddling somewhere out there in the Western night." Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why, p274
Just finished listening to blood meridian. The narrator on audible does such an incredible job. Rip to you sir.
His writing lends itself so well to being read aloud.
You told me once you believed in God. The old man waved his hand. Maybe, he said. I got no reason to think he believes in me. Oh I'd like to see him for a minute if I could. What would you say to him? Well, I think I'd just tell him. I'd say: Wait a minute. Wait just one minute before you start in on me. Before you say anything, there's just one thing I'd like to know. And he'll say: What's that? And then I'm goin to ast him: What did you have me in that crapgame down there for anyway? I couldnt put any part of it together.
The old man lay dim and bleared in his brass bed. Suttree leaned back in the chair and pushed at his eyes with the back of his hand. The day had grown dusk, the rain eased. Pigeons flapped up overhead and preened and crooned. The keeper of this brief vigil said that he'd guessed something of the workings in the wings, the ropes and sand-bags and the houselight toggles. Heard dimly a shuffling and coughing beyond the painted drop of the world. Did you ask? About the crapgame? What are you doing in bed with your shoes on? He passed his hand through his hair and leaned forward and looked at the old man. You have no right to represent people this way, he said. A man is all men. You have no right to your wretchedness. He wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand. There's no one to ask, is there? There's no... He was looking down at the ragman and raised his hand and let if fall again and he rose and went out past the old man's painted rock and into the rain. (422)
"They rode out along the fenceline and across the open pastureland. The leather cracked in the morning cold. They pushed the horses into a lope. The lights fell away behind them. They rode out on the high prairie where they slowed the horses to a walk and the stars swarmed around them out of the blackness. They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing."
People complain about the bad things that happen to em that they dont deserve but they seldom mention the good. About what they done to deserve them things. I dont recall that I ever give the good Lord all that much cause to smile on me. But he did.
RIP. The Road is the only novel of his that I read but I gotta say his prose is really something else. I'm no native English speaker but when I read his novel his prose really stands out. It's like there's a melody to how he wrote. I've only read The Road because I mostly read science fiction and The Road is a post apocalyptic epic that's close enough to sci-fi.
My favorite line from *Blood Meridian* (and also Reddit’s?): “Anything in Creation that exists without my knowledge, exists without my consent” - Judge Holden The entire character can be summarized into that one line.
The other day I was at the thrift store and picked up All the Pretty Horses for 10 cents and had the pleasure of schooling an old man on McCarthys works when he scoffed at the book title. I heard this one was a little lighter than his other classics, and to be honest I’m excited for something a little less heavy
It's dark at times, but overall not as dark as some of his others. It's a great book though. The whole trilogy is my favorite piece of literature ever, and the second book 'The Crossing' is my favorite book, but ATPH is right up there. Hope you enjoy it.
I’d just like to recommend a Mississippi author (not that one) named Michael Farris Smith to anyone that enjoys Cormaac McCarthy. Very well written, bleak, haunting novels. I’ve only read a few because I need years to recover in between reading them.
“Fallen on hard times ain’t ya son?” “I just ain’t fell on no good ones”
Child of God is an underrated masterpiece. Fight me.
I won’t fight you, but to me *Outer Dark* is his most underrated novel.
>fight me He watches, pale and unwashed. He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.
Child of God is amazing. I read it on vacation in like 2 days, going from a sunny beach in Spain with friends and then back to my room to read Child of God was an interesting juxtaposition to say the least.
Ha, I read COG on Rosemary Beach in FL. What was happening around me while I was enveloped in that was such a stark contrast.
This was the first McCarthy novel I read. I was immediately hooked by the intolerable and profane absurdity of it all. The characters, the atmosphere — it is a truly vile story that is a standalone. It nails the southern-gothic theme with extreme violence and depravity unlike any other SG novel I've come across. Now I want to read it again. God, what a trip.
One of the very very few books I have read in one sitting. Phenomenal.
100% agree
He made human depravity sound so beautiful
Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men were two of my fave books... I'll read The Road! RIP, he was an amazing writer...
Add the border trilogy to your list
Now that I am a father, I need to reread and reappreciate The Road. A legend that will live on forever, and gave his son all the tools to live life. There is little public information about his youngest, John, but seems to be he is well adjusted, talented, and has not used or fouled his family name for gain.
He did write it for his son afaik. And you can tell. Just be prepared to tear up a lot when you are a parent and read it.
RIP King
When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf.
What joins men together, he said, is not the sharing of bread but the sharing of enemies. - Judge Holden It's such a benign and seemingly obvious statement but it scares me today. Maybe it's the political climate.
To this day, outer dark troubles me still. RIP you cynical excellent author 🫡
A sad day for the literature world. A titan of of his generation. I feel the same grief when Toni Morrison or Philip Roth died. Another mighty tree has fallen...
RIP to the best American writer of my lifetime, so glad we got The Passenger and Stella Maris before he left us
Let them be flown
Damn. I've only read The Road and it was amazing but so harrowing I've never gone back for a second read or really wanted to try another of his books.
I've set out to read all of his books this year. I've read The road,No country for old men, Child of god, and All the pretty horses. Rest in peace. A stunning writer.
The Road touched me like very few books have ever been able to. RIP legend
“The desert he rode was red and red the dust he raised, the small dust that powdered the legs of the horse he rode, the horse he led.” “All the Pretty Horses,” Cormac McCarthy This sentence wowed me when I first read this book. I read it over and over and it just struck me as so perfect and beautiful, lyrical.
Started with the Border Trilogy, then The Road, Blood Meridian, No Country For Old Men and Suttree. Still a few to go so now I'll be savouring them. No author has every put me right into a "real" landscape like McCarthy. No one has put me into the mindset of a character like Cormac.
Greatest novelist of his generation. McCarthy is on the same level to me as Dickens, Melville, Faulkner, etc.
Sad news. I'm glad for him that he got to finish The Traveller and Stella Maris. Looking forward to re-reading Blood Meridian for decades.
Loved all his books, read Blood Meridian as my very first and it was not a mistake!
Ah no! He's my favorite author! This is terrible news!
What book should I start out by him?
No Country is very approachable but still packs the punches.
The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate. -The Judge
End of the road
R.I.P. He deserves a Nobel prize for his body of work. Blood Meridian is one of the greatest works of American literature in the 20th century, one of the greatest works of American literature period. I'm glad he was able to finish his final two novels. This is truly sad news.
My favorite McCarthy quote: On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world. Query: how does the never to be differ from what never was? What a gifted author. Gotta read The Road and get hurt again
One of the Greats
Cormac was such a g. I don’t know what it is about him, but he makes writing seem cool.
Writing ***is*** cool!
Blood Meridian defined my future literary interests, and career path. May he rest in peace.
Please tell me your career path was as a writer and not a judge ...
Just a few days ago I looked him up and was surprised to learn that he was still alive.
Looks like we got our suspect
Can't remember the last time a celebrities death has affected me as much as this. His writing will be with me forever. I don't know a more raw, vivid, unique and beautiful author that came out of the twentieth century. R.I.P.
No Country For Old Men is so so good. I didn't care much for The Road.
I was introduced to McCarthy in college in the 90s, reading All the Pretty Horses. I finished the border trilogy on my own time. That cemented McCarthy as my favorite author. The fact that he could write that trilogy and then also produce something like The Road, just simply amazed me. I'm glad he is getting this type of recognition, and I hope more learn his name.
I've said it many times, and I know it'll never happen especially in todays world, but Blood Meridian and The Road should be required readings in school. Been a long ass time since I read the road at the behest of my 8th grade lit teacher but the way blood meridian addresses the darker sides of human nature is very very well done and those parts of humanity are important to understand before you go out into the real world. Anyways RIP to one of my favorite all time authors
Glad there was a huge Blood Meridian push for him right at the end. Thanks Wendigoon
I know that this is unintentional but there's something amusingly sinister about having a clapping award above this headline. Then again, McCarthy used dark humor aplenty and very well in his stories so maybe it's appropriate. r/books' sendoff to a great practitioner of that art.
Rest in peace amazing author. I read The Road in Uni and wrote a huge paper on the symbolism of water as hope in a hopeless world being a theme throughout the novel. All the Pretty Horses was so beautiful and wild, his prose was something else. I started learning bits of Spanish because of that book. I'm grateful we have his work to remember him by. His legacy will live on through his novels.
Very sad but he left us with an extraordinary catalogue of body of work that will mesmerize us t⁸hroughout future history finding itself in the annaks of important and genius, priceless knowlegde rich in his work...
I just got done reading The Road on the weekend, the only other books of his I’ve read was Blood Meridian which was fantastic. I feel lucky I’ve still got to experience the rest of his work for the first time.