Lately, I've been reading a lot of Cormac McCarthy. I wrote a little something on The Road a few months ago (where does time go?). Since that time, I've plowed through a few more of his books.
No Country for Old Men was basically a lot like the movie. The Coen Brothers didn't mix it up too much. Most of the dialogue from the motion picture was lifted directly from the book, which is a good thing. If you saw the movie and got confused or mad, don't expect the book to answer the questions for you. You get a little more detail, a little more background on the scary dude, a lot more of the sheriff's ramblings, and a little bit more on Carson Wells (the guy Woody Harrelson played), but the stuff that happens offscreen on the movie is the same in the book. Except it does definitely say what happened to Llewelyn's wife...But enough about the movie...The book is a great, quick read. It's easy to read, but has enough little "nuggets" of wisdom to keep you thinking. I'd recommend this one for the beach.
Next up I read Child of God, also by McCarthy. It's basically about an in-bred halfwit that does some very bad stuff. It's another quick read, but it's also pretty gross and disturbing. I read somewhere that an English teacher got in trouble for assigning this book to high school students. I can see why. I don't really know why he'd choose this book for them to read anyway. It's not a bad book, but it's not as good as the other stuff I've read from Cormac.
Finally, I read Blood Meridian. This book is waaaay different than the other ones I'd read from McCarthy. It has a lot of violence like his other stuff, but it's wrapped in a very dense, sometimes hard to grasp language. By the end of the book, I had a trusty dictionary with me to try to decifer some of the words. A huge array of words are used in this thing. I don't have the book with me at the moment, but I found an excerpt online to give you a sample of what I'm talking about:
The horses trudged sullenly the alien ground and the round earth rolled beneath them silently milling the greater void wherein they were contained. In the neuter austerity of that terrain all phenomena were bequeathed a strange equality and no one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass could forth claim to precedence. The very clarity of these articles belied their familiarity, for the eye predicates the whole on some feature or part and here was nothing more luminous than another and nothing more enshadowed and in the optical democracy of such landscapes all preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kinship.
And that's pretty much how it goes the whole way through. Plus, it has a fair amount of spanish language intertwined with no key to explain what's said. And, you get lots of passages like:
JimBob walked into a bar. An altercation ensued. A man lost an arm. JimBob was killed. They rode on.
(of course I made that passage up)
Um. Very matter of factly told. Not a lot of emotion in the narrator's voice.
The story itself is of a group of ruffians in the mid 1880s traveling across the southwest killing Indians. That's a very loose way of putting it. The story starts off focused on a kid, then goes into a looooooong middle section where it doesn't focus on any one person, just the story of the group as they confront Indians, Mexicans, and other peeps. It's supposedly based on a true story and it's very, very violent. Along the way, you get your "nuggets of wisdom" from a dude named Judge Holden, who is this book's version of the scary guy from No Country. The end brings it all together back to the kid and the judge and of course it'll leave ya scratching your head. Then you get to the Epilogue and "uh".
Overall, it's one of the most difficult books I've ever read, but it's also a very rewarding one. I don't know if I'd recommend it on the beach, but if you've got a GRE test to study for and a yearning to learn some new words while learning some history about the "real wild west," pick this thing up. College students will be reading it in English class 200 years from now if we still have school.
