One reason I picked this up was because I rarely read Western novels. In fact, I can’t recall a single one, though I’m sure I picked up one or two of my father’s when I was a kid. At any rate, it’s a new setting for me. Not that All the Pretty Horses is a “typical” Western, at least as far as I can tell from the reviews and whatnot I’ve read. But it has an almost exclusively male cowboy-type cast, and it has horses and guns and western-ness about it, so I figure it counts.

The story: Sixteen year old John Grady Cole and his friend Lacey Rawlins leave Texas for Mexico when Cole’s mother sells the ranch after the death of her father. They meet up with a third boy, who calls himself Jimmy Blevins, though his true background is rather mysterious. I hate spoilers, so all I’ll say about the rest is that they get into a number of situations both good and bad, and they find that Mexico is not always a pleasant place to be. It touches on friendship and loyalty and trust, love and life and death, and all the conflicts that they bring.

The story is good and the characters are compelling, but for me the best thing about the book was the prose. The dialect is wonderfully done–it’s more rhythm than spelling, so it flows (I hate it when I have to sound out words and guess what they are… Mark Twain drives me crazy). The writing style is alternately lush and spare. The descriptions of riding and the land, in particular, are beautifully detailed and often poetic, and have a natural rhythm that would be well-suited to reading aloud. Other times whole scenes are skipped with no more than a full-stop, often to poignant effect. In the same way, there is very little exposition at all, with a few notable exceptions; the past, it seems to say, is over and only the present matters.

The ending was… inevitable, I suppose. Nothing else would have fit the characters and the story. Again, I hesitate to say too much, but the ending maintained the feel of the novel as a whole: Nothing is permanent, nothing is certain–but if you don’t give up, there’s always a chance that you’ll find what you’re looking for.

There are only a few things I didn’t care for. Nitpicky ones, really. McCarthy doesn’t use quotation marks, which I find annoying. I’ve heard people say that this is because it makes things flow better, but that’s not true for me. Also, there were a few scenes in the beginning when no names were used, with only men in the scene, so I wasn’t always sure which ‘he’ was doing things, and in the same vein there were long stretches of dialogue where I would misplace who was saying what; usually it was ok, but when there are a dozen short lines without a break, it’s easy to switch speakers. This sort of thing, I admit, is a pet peeve of mine. Ambiguous meaning is fine, but the actual text? Not so much. The rest of the book made up for it, though.

And one last thing, which didn’t bother me because I can read Spanish… but I don’t think I could have made it to the end if I didn’t. There’s enough scattered around that it would have driven me crazy even though, in all honesty, none of it is terribly important plot- or character-wise. Just a heads up for anyone else like me.

I’m following CJ’s lead here and joining in the Book Awards Reading Challenge. I went for a variety of awards, but I already own 7 of these books so they make the top list by default. Yeah, this is an excuse to get through a chunk of my TBR pile. But then, it’s also an excuse to buy even more books…

My main list:

• The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (Pulitzer 1921)
• A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller (Hugo 1961)
• Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson (Newbery 1978)
• The Color Purple by Alice Walker (National Book Award, Pulitzer 1983)
• Dusk by James Salter (PEN/Faulkner Award 1989)
• All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy (National Book Award, NBCC 1992)
• The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje (Booker, Governor General 1992)
• The Moor’s Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie (Costa/Whitbread 1996)
• Life of Pi by Yann Martel (Booker 2002)
• Birds of a Feather by Jacqueline Winspear (Agatha 2004)
• Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold (Hugo, Nebula 2004)
• Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke (Hugo, World Fantasy 2005)

I also have a rather long list of extras, just in case I feel like changing or adding more, but I won’t bore you with those. In all, I noted at least one book from all but two awards listed on the site. I didn’t pick one from the Bram Stoker because I don’t really care for horror… though Gaiman’s American Gods, which I wouldn’t classify as horror at all, was on the list, so maybe there are others I’d like too. I didn’t look too closely at the Gold Dagger because I already had two mysteries on my list by the time I got there. But I’m so close to having all of ‘em… I may have to do it at some point

If you see one on either of those lists that I might like, please mention it.