All the Pretty Horses

Last weekend, my wife asked me to go through several boxes of books that hadn't been opened since we moved into our house three years ago. I trudged upstairs, sat down in the closet, and peeled open the first box, assuming that the process would take two minutes before I decided to sell everything inside to a used-books store.

As with most things in my life, I was wrong.

Twenty minutes later, I was forty pages into All the Pretty Horses, a wonderful, engaging book by the fantastic writer Cormac McCarthy. I would guess that I've read the book three or four times in my life, and it gets better each time that I do. Of course, the book itself doesn't change - the words have been the same since it was first published in 1992, when I was fourteen years old. But the experience of growing and aging and maturing and using a specific piece of art as a kind of milestone along the way is a rewarding experience. I see and understand things at thirty-seven that I couldn't when I was fourteen or twenty-two. This isn't to say that the things that matter to me now are more important than those that caught my eye as a teenager - the needs and wants of a teenager are just as valid as those of an octogenarian.

But I digress. The story of John Grady Cole and his flight from the South Texas town of San Angelo into the expansive and dangerous freedom of Northern Mexico is thrilling, compelling, and so well-written that it hurts to read it. For the record, I have never read a Western novel save those of McCarthy, and am resolutely uninterested in the genre when he is not the creator. That said, as a life-long city boy who doesn't find the story of cowboys and ranching and desolate desertscapes interesting or romantic at all, I salivate at McCarthy's intense physical descriptions of horses as though I had been raised on a ranch.

If you haven't read this book yet, do yourself a favor and read it. It's one of those rare books that can change your life in a small and subtle way, and any work of art that can accomplish that is worth your time.