Touching and inspiring. Passed and paled into the darkening land, more to come. More to come, indeed. ( )

Interesting read -- a 16-year old Texan wonders in Mexico (I think in 1950s), learning some hard knocks. I can see this book on a high school reading list, and there were some interesting thought-provoking parts. Ultimately, it's a boy's coming of age book that I just didn't get that into. ( )

I think I liked it....it was so strange. it didn't seem plot driven, more like the author liked a character and decided to let him out to play.....It didn't seem like he intended for any of the adventures (or the end), only that there would be a journey.

The Spanish speaking through-out would have been MUCH better with some serious translation or without so much talking. There were whole sections of the book I know I would have enjoyed much more had I had any idea what they were talking about. And, the whole point of a book is to NOT be tied to a computer, so I didn't seem much point in looking up each part.

I don't know that I want to read another book by this author though. While I liked his writing style, I didn't like the aimless feeling of his plot. ( )

This is a story about John Grady, a teenaged boy from Texas who loves horses and the ranch life and when this way of life is threatened after his grandfather dies, together with his friend Rawlins, rides to Mexico. In this journey they have deadly adventures, face imprisonment, and John Grady falls in love and suffers heartbreak. A broad and long adventure.

There are books which when finished feel as though I have emerged from a wrestling match exhausted. It's never really clear who won, and it's not always that the book is bad or particularly difficult. And this book felt like that.

This is the fourth McCarthy book I've read and at this point there are certain things I expect when I open his books. Among them: a wonderful description of the landscapes the story is set in; periods and the few commas being all the punctuation there is; some adventure of some kind; and some violence. It's for these reasons that McCarthy's writing is often described as "masculine prose" by some critics. For me, habituation has made some of these things less interesting, especially the violence. There's only so many times knife fights and shootouts can excite me. In fact what maintains my interest in his books is his brilliant depiction of human connection and parts of the human experience, which of course isn't mentioned as much in the blurbs and on the covers of his books, maybe because it's less exciting than horse rides and shootouts and also because it might contradict the "masculine prose" statements.

But take this bit of dialogue I think is really good for instance:
"....That all courage was a form of constancy. That it was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily.

Parts like this, as well as the telling of the struggle to do what is right, and friendships and human connection is what I like best from McCarthy's work. Maybe it's just personal taste and if I liked horses and guns and fights and adventure I would have liked this even better. ( )

To be honest, I almost put this book down after reading only a few pages because I found it so hard to read. It felt sloppy and disorganized. I am VERY glad that I continued to read and would now count this as one of my favorite books. McCarthy has an interesting style that can be hard to swallow at times, but he is a master writer and the story is wonderful. ( )