Reader's Block

I haven’t had a good book to read in what feels like months. I’ve been reading short stories and articles and read a good-enough book on vacation, but I haven't been really satisfied by a book in a while. Finally I diagnosed myself with Reader's Block and prescribed a classic.

Never having read Cormac McCarthy, I started with All the Pretty Horses and was stunned, by page forty-three, at it’s beauty. I hadn’t assumed such lyricism by an author I associated with stark masculinity and grotesqueries like The Road and No Country for Old Men. If I were to guess, before I began this book, I would have assumed his style would be straightforward, in your face, even. Based on nothing, really. Based on the movie version of No Country.

But I was wrong, and from the first page, from the repetition of dark and cold and no wind and the long sentences like rolling hills and the lack of punctuation, commas sparse as Texas trees in my East-coast mind, I’ve been charmed by McCarthy's spell.

This kind of writing is exciting to me, it raises my body temperature and makes my heart beat faster. Do yourself a favor and read this passage out loud:

They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.

And that's just one sentence. It’s the kind of sentence you have to read aloud; I whispered it while reading and walking down my block and again, louder, as soon as I got home. This sentence reminds me of a passage from Midnight’s Children which is too long to quote here but spirals up and down around a green and black witch. Poetry. My faith in books is restored.