All the Pretty Horses and almost anything else by Cormac MacCarthy

I decided last year to try reading Cormac MacCarthy. After a little research, I decided to start with Blood Meridian. What a ride. At first it reminded me a little of Larry McMurtry, but it gets darker than Larry does, and I finished it and said "give me more." So I read The Crossing, which was set in more recent times - 20th century - but for purposes of setting and character and dialog could have been a hundred years prior. Then I took on All the Pretty Horses, and I realized that MacCarthy, aside from being a supreme stylist, really tells the same story almost every time. It's usually two young guys from Texas that go to Mexico and have (mis) adventures. My other shallow, illiterate complaint with MacCarthy stems from his love of sticking a page or two of Spanish conversation in the book every now and then. Not being bilingual at all, I assumed he was writing for the English reader and the conversations rolled with the story line. Then one day I used an online translator and discovered, damn! the conversations are not MacCarthy showing off his Spanish, they need to be translated. So, being a lazy, pissed-off American, I stopped reading his stuff for a while.

Incidentally, I'm a truly lazy American. If a great book gets turned into a movie, there's a high risk I'll just watch the film and not get around to the book. With All The Pretty Horses, I'm glad I read the book first... so much lost.

Anyway...
Then I read The Road. A sharper turn left literarily speaking I can't image. Suddenly it's a post-apocalytic future with a man and his son trying to reach the South on foot from the Northeast - a long ways from Mexico (still managed to keep any women characters out). I was utterly drawn in before I realized it was science fiction (which I just don't read anymore, college was enough). The Road. No horses, no women, mostly rainy weather, in lieu of a wagon the father is pushing a shopping cart, fortunately not too many barbarians, and a relatively positive ending where MacCarthy finally gives the boy a mother figure. I plan to reread Blood Meridian and The Road, but probably not the rest of them. At least not until I learn Spanish. Which I'm not studying.