The new year

I just read All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plane, and No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy. They are quite different from the usual young adult fare that I have been reading. They are all set in west Texas along the border with Mexico and New Mexico.

It almost seems like the plot is secondary to what he wants to get across. It doesn't come off as didactic, which is nice. Sometimes it seems to be a window into a world teeming with potential and opportunity, but the main characters are fated for disappointment and sadness. Fate doesn't allow for most people to be happy, he seems to be saying. It's so opposite what I actually feel about life that I don't understand why I read it, let alone enjoy it. I enjoy his sentences how they are what needs to be written. Nothing more. Nothing less. Sometimes they flow on for a couple of lines as a character reminisces about the flashes of happiness and the breathtaking lightning seen across the border seering in the darkness, iluminating a wild untamed land where the young go to become men. . . That whole idea of growing up. McCarthy takes it in a new direction. I partially agree with him, but I still don't like the idea.

And life continues.