Tag: Books

Read Eighty Books a Year: A Reader’s Arithmetic:

Stephen King reads sixty or more books a year. I’m lucky if I reach twenty—and the disparity bothers me more than I care to admit. Not because I value quantity over quality, but because there are simply too many books I want to live with, too many voices I want time to answer back to.

Time flows from us like a running faucet. Time is our common currency granted daily. How do we spend it? It comes down to our priorities.

King has been candid about how he does it. He treats reading as a necessity, not a luxury, reading every day for two or three hours, sometimes more. As he puts it in On Writing: “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.”

That rings true for me. When I write, it’s almost always in response to what I’ve read—to extend an argument, disagree with it, enthuse about it, or share it with others.

King refuses to slog through books that fail to engage him. He abandons them without guilt. Interest propels reading; boredom kills it. And he always has a book with him—reading while waiting, traveling, between tasks, or before bed. Those fragments accumulate.

The numbers themselves are demystifying. Suppose your goal is eighty books a year with an average length of 300 pages. That’s 24,000 pages annually. Divide by 365, and you arrive at roughly 66 pages a day. At a moderate pace of about 40 pages per hour, that comes to around an hour and forty minutes of daily reading.

That’s doable.

My final tip is one that has helped me most: read in clusters. Choose a topic that genuinely interests you and commit to five or six books in that area.

Reading a single book from a wildly eclectic list can feel shallow; focused reading builds momentum, deepens understanding, and increases motivation.

This year, for example, I’ve chosen to immerse myself in Kentucky sage Wendell Berry—two biographies and three of Berry’s own books. Depth, it turns out, can be the best catalyst for volume.

—rj

Small Changes, Big Results: Lessons from Atomic Habits

I’ve finally bitten the bullet and started reading James Clear’s Atomic Habits, the celebrated bestseller that has sold over 25 million copies and been translated into more than sixty languages.

I rarely read self-improvement books—not because I’ve arrived at perfection (far from it), but because I gravitate toward literary and intellectual works, and leisure time is finite. Still, Atomic Habits begins with such clarity and momentum that I can already tell it will be a quick read for me—simply because I can’t put it down.

The title itself hints at the premise: small, almost imperceptible changes that compound over time. Baby steps, if you will, that quietly evolve into daily discipline and, eventually, a better self. I’ve long believed that we can’t really make friends with the outer world until we make friends with ourselves, and Clear’s approach aligns with that idea.

Go to bed a little earlier, away from blue screens. Make your bed when you rise. Keep your bathroom tidy. Simple acts, but ones that generate momentum and a sense of self-respect. Want to read more? Start with a single page. Avoiding exercise? Take a five-minute walk. Clear gives modern life to an ancient axiom: “The longest journey begins with a single step.”

This is one of those books I’m reading with a journal nearby, interacting with the text—even if only a paragraph at a time. That, too, is a habit I know would enrich my life, but one I’ve too often postponed.

The irony is that when we fail to act on habits we know would improve our lives, the result isn’t neutrality—it’s to sour on ourselves.

Being up in years, my gray matter has shifted. Memory doesn’t cooperate the way it once did. There was a time I could glance at a list of twenty French or German words and walk away minutes later with them securely lodged in mind. No longer.

That frustration nearly convinced me to abandon my desire to read in Italian. But Atomic Habits reframed the problem: it isn’t the goal that matters so much as the process—where I am today versus where I was yesterday. Incremental steps still count. And so I persist with Italian, imperfectly, patiently.

It’s time for breakfast now—but not before I make my bed.

—rj

Reading Recommendations For 2026


Welcome to my 8th Annual Annotated Book Recommendations.

As always, I try to select the very best reads, drawn from authoritative sources, books generally regarded as canonical, as well as works endorsed by critics of the first rank. I also aim for balance through stimulating titles across a range of interests.

Since this list begins as my own, it includes books I should have read long ago.

The hardest part is limiting worthy candidates in order to arrive at a manageable list of ten to twelve works of fiction and nonfiction. Ultimately, this list is yours—to read from, to browse, or simply to keep in mind.

Happy New Year!

Fiction:

Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart (Achebe’s landmark novel that explores British colonial and missionary intrusion, destabilizing a rich and complex Igbo society.)

Berger, Thomas. Little Big Man. (A novel challenging the mythology of the American West and the reliability of historical truth.)

Broch, Hermann. The Death of Virgil. (One of the supreme masterpieces of the 20th Century dramatizing the poet Virgil’s final hours, debating burning the Aeneid manuscript, fearing art’s complicity in fostering illusion rather than truth.)

Butler, Octavia. Parable of the Sower. (An African-American writer of eleven science fiction novels, Butler may have written the most relevant dystopian novel of our time. Published in 1993, the setting is thirty years later. Christian nationalism has usurped the government, the US is corporately run, states and cities restrict immigrants, the gap grows between rich and poor. Southern California is on fire. The fallout of not heeding climate change is horrific. Change is life’s constant. We adapt, or we perish.)

Colette. Claudine at School. (Colette’s first novel, partly autobiographical, depicting adolescent rebellion and the interplay between transgression and innocence.)

Dazai, Obamu. No Longer Human. (An exploration of social estrangement in a rapidly changing post-war society.)

Keegan, Claire. Small Things Like These. (Shortlisted for a Booker, an Irish novella of ecclesiastical hypocrisy and moral resistance. Several critics call it “a perfect book.”)

Kipling, Rudyard. Kim. (While some have dubbed Kipling’s renowned novel as imperialist, it deserves reading for its multi-layered narrative, vivid in its vignettes of India, suspenseful as a story of espionage, and morally significant as a tale of spiritual quest.)

McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses. (McCarthy may be our greatest novelist since Faulkner, writing a mesmerizing prose. This novel tells of Texas teen cowboy John Grady Cole’s quest to continue a vanishing way of life in Mexico, only to encounter danger, betrayal, loss, and a quest for justice. Winner of National Book Award for Fiction 1992, and National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction 1992.)

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. (An American classic, based on the true story of Margaret Garner, an enslaved Kentucky woman escaping slavery who, recaptured, kills her child rather than have her live in slavery. Morrison delivers in rendering slavery’s horror.)

Powers, Richard. Bewilderment. (Featuring a widowed father raising a neurodivergent son with a passion for animals in a next generation world devastated by climate change and species loss, Powers’ intense lyrical narrative probes the infinity of the universe juxtaposed by human limitation).

Pullman, Philip. The Book of Dust. (Pullman’s new fantasy work is a sequel trilogy to that of His Dark Materials, expanding on Lyra’s world, her separated daemon companion, and a corrupt Magisterium that governs religious and political thought. A masterpiece you won’t want to finish.)

Rhys, Jean. Good Morning, Midnight. (Through interior monologue, Rhys’s novel captures the yearnings of a middle-aged woman in a patriarchal world that enforces women’s dependency on men, but esteems youth and beauty foremost.)

Simenon, Georges. Pietyr the Latvian. (A good place to begin reading Belgian mystery writer Simenon, whose inspector Jules Maigret probes the arrival in Paris of a notorious criminal. Filled with twists and psychological depth, you’ll want to read more Simenon, who wrote 75 Maigret novels.)

Tartt, Donna. The Goldfinch. (A terrorist bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art kills 13-year old Theo Decker’s mother. In the confused aftermath, he steals a 17th c. painting, “The Goldfinch.” A story of survival, the painting symbolizes resilience, the ability of art to sustain a traumatized life. Pulitzer Prize winner, 2014).

Wells, H. G. The Time Machine. (A landmark science fiction read, mirroring the anxieties of the Victorian era: a stark meditation on entropy—biological, social, and moral—and on the uneasy faith in progress that defined the late nineteenth century).

Non Fiction:

Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. (A critique of Freud’s limitations and profound meditation on mortality’s central role in shaping civilization.)

Cassidy, John. Capitalism and Its Critics. (Rather than a polemic, denouncing capitalism, Cassidy features a myriad of proponents as well as critics, resulting in an informed primer for understanding current debates about markets, globalization, and the future of work.)

Damrosch, Leo. Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson. (In his short life of 44 years, the often invalid Stevenson, nonetheless, produced novels, poems and novellas that continue to excite the popular imagination. Damrosch avoids hagiography in this fully rounded portraiture of the great storyteller.)

Frank, Edwin. Stranger Than Fiction. (Frank, the editor of the New York Review of Books Classics Series, discusses forgotten or overlooked books that may be more culturally informative than celebrated canonical works.)

Hoare, Philip. William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love. (A compendium of visionary poet and engraver Blake’s influence on other artists and thinkers, from Derek Jarman to Iris Murdoch to James Joyce to the pre-Raphaelites. )

Kolbert, Elizabeth. The Sixth Extinction. ( A timely, thoughtful analysis of drivers of past species extinction and those of the present in which evolution is now principally influenced by humans.)

Kowalski, Gary. The Souls of Animals. (A Unitarian Universalist minister writes a grounded study in the emotional life of animals. If animals have souls, i.e., capacity for love, loyalty, grief and empathy, it follows humans must reassess their ethical relationship to its animal kindred.)

Nossack, Hans Erich. The End. (Nossack revisits Hamburg shortly after its 1943 allied fire-bombing. A discerning narrative in restrained prose, The End focuses on human trauma rather than physical destruction, measuring its limits in the aftermath of catastrophe.)

Osnos, Evan. The Haves and Have-Yachts. (A tour of America’s cordoned places where the rich congregate, enjoying amenities unknown to the wider public, possessors of most of the nation’s wealth. How did they accumulate it? What do they want? What do they fear?)

Prideaux, Sue. Wild Thing. (The first biography of Gauguin to appear in thirty years, Prideaux attempts to separate the myth from the realty, loving his art, but not his misdeeds.)

Raffles, Hugh. The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time. (A profound, geological distillation across epochs of violence, loss, and extinction that become metaphor of human rupture inflicted by dispossession, environmental change, and the long reach of capitalism.)

Sanbonmatsu, John. The Omnivore’s Deception: What We Get Wrong about Meat, Animals, and Ourselves. (A leftist cultural critic, Sanbonmatsu argues on ethical grounds for abandoning a meat economy, which he links with other forms of social injustice; but then how do we feed billions of people without meat? Sanbonmatsu makes a cogent argument meriting thoughtful appraisal.)

Stein, Gertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. (An essential read in the making of Modernism in the arts, Stein poses as her life long partner, reminiscing Stein’s influence on avant-garde figures such as Picasso, Matisse, Hemingway and Pound.)

Thurman, Judith. Colette: Secrets of the Flesh. (Thurman’s definitive biography of French novelist Colette, exploring not only her life events, but the social and psychological dynamics that continually shaped her identity.)

Books I Read in 2025

Byatt, A.S. Possession.

Defoe, Daniel. Moll Flanders.

Grant, Richard. Dispatches From Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta.

Haruf, Kent. Plainsong.

Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. 

Knaussgaard, Karl Ove. My Struggle. Bk. 1.

Knausgaard, Karl Ove. My Struggle. Bk. 2.

Knausgaard, Karl Ove. My Struggle. Bk. 3

Knausgaard, Karl Ove. My Struggle. Book 4.

Kristof, Nicholas. Chasing Hope.

Landon, Brooks. Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read.

McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses.

Mitford, Jessica. Hons and Rebs.

Rufo, Christopher F. The Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything.

Salina, Carl. Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe. 

Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others.

Sumption, Jonathan. The Challenges.

Woolf, Virginia. Diary, 1918-41.

A Legacy of Righteous Minds

Existence exerts a randomness in its distribution of fate. The wicked, as Job tells us, often live long, escaping their misdeeds with impunity; the just and talented, curtailed lives amid their greatest promise.

The list of those I deem the “righteous,” those who’ve especially influenced who I am, the values I embrace, and my hopes for a better human future taken from us early, their age at death indicated in parentheses, includes Princeton sage Walter Kaufman (59), biologist Stephen Jay Gould (62), astronomer Carl Sagan (62), science fiction writer Octavia Butler (58), essayist and novelist George Orwell (46), political sage and philosopher John Stewart Mill (66), and, not least, poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (44).

I’m tempted to write a series of extended separate tributes to each of them in Brimmings, but will limit my commentary for now.

I was in my early twenties. a college student just out of the military, when I somehow came upon Walter Kaufmann’s The Faith of a Heretic (1961), which I’m re-reading now. He was the first to admonish me to accept only the empirical in the quest to discern the probable, to find courage to change course, and live daringly: “The question is not whether one has doubts, but whether one is honest about them.”

Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould impressed me early with his clear cutting, scintillating prose endowed with grace, teaching me that science is not simply pursuing the factual, but a way of thinking that enlarges one’s humanity. Life is by-product of chance and contingency: “Human beings arose, rather, as a consequence of thousands of linked events, none of which foresaw the future.”

Astronomer Carl Sagan demanded the imprimatur of evidence for any accepted belief. Rationality demands we not cloister ourselves in cultural hand downs—that extraordinary beliefs merit skepticism: Compromising truth invites demagoguery and superstition’s advance: “We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers.”

African-American Octavia Butler has been a remarkable recent read, writing eleven science fiction novel standouts resonating urgency in confronting systemic collapse of ecosystems consequent with climate change. Her Parable of the Sower, a must read, has proven chillingly prescient. Change is life’s inevitability, morally indifferent, demanding adaptability to survive: “Human beings fear difference, and they fear it so deeply that they will not only oppress but destroy what they see as different.”

George Orwell, well known for his clairvoyant 1984, has always impressed me with the clarity of his writing, achieved through disciplined study; his wariness of manipulative despotism and its verbal deceit stratagems such as ’doublespeak,” timely and precise in their warnings of euphemism and abstraction: “Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”

John Stewart Mill, “the saint of rationalism,” remains a seminal influence, ahead of his time, a champion of classical liberalism and its advocacy of the minority’s right to dissent. He taught me about nature’s indifference and logic’s necessity in a world absent of revelation. I return to him repeatedly for wisdom and inspiration: “If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins has long been my most esteemed poet with his vibrant “sprung rhythm,” latent with emotion, a passion for nature and for those who suffer—so many—life’s inequities. His poetry sings, reenacting experience via the sensory, capturing the essence of all things. As a Jesuit priest, while not resolving the problem of suffering by resorting to a cozy theodicy or relying on sentimentality, he helps render its endurance: ‘I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.”

I am forever grateful for their stalwart witness to life’s truths. Their lives argue by example rather than system—that meaning isn’t guaranteed by justice, nor extinguished by its absence. Fate distributes arbitrarily; conscience does not.

—rj

Fran Lebowitz: Just Plain Irresistible

On my morning romp through The Guardian, I bumped into Fran Lebowitz—a new acquaintance for me—and immediately took to her sardonic take on so many of the things, often political, that keep one awake at night.

Now 75, Lebowitz’s essays are well worth reading, even if they sometimes make you wince—saber-toothed witticisms worthy of jotting down. She does not suffer fools gladly, and she’d make a terrific talk-show guest; in fact, she often has.

Her best book, The Lebowitz Reader (1994), remains thoroughly timely, a compendium of sharp observations on our cultural absurdities.

It may surprise you that she never attended college. A self-declared misfit, she spent high school hiding books under her desk, frequently getting caught and suspended.

She has no illusions about the times we live in, the reluctance to resist conformity, and the challenge of being an authentic self. We’d be great friends.

A consummate non-conformist, she owns no computer, no cellphone, not even a typewriter. But she does own 10,000 books and reads deeply—especially Baldwin and Fitzgerald. On Fitzgerald, she says:

“Most of my adult life I’ve been very irritated by the legend of F. Scott Fitzgerald. So every five years, I reread The Great Gatsby, hoping it’s not that good—but unfortunately it is.”

Her political commentary is cutting. She laments the resurgence of book banning—driven largely by one political party that still enjoys the support of nearly half the nation’s voters.

A liberal Democrat, she rejects centrist Democrats who fail to stand up to corporate power. Clinton, she thought, seemed like a Republican. Reagan, to her, proved the prototype of the “dumb president,” and Trump the worst incarnation of incompetence—a “cheap hustler, lazy, but mostly dumb.”

On the indulgence of the wealthy in politics, she is characteristically blunt:

“I object to people who are rich in politics. I don’t think they should be allowed to be in politics. It is bad for everybody but rich people, and rich people don’t need any more help… No one earns a billion dollars. People earn $10 an hour; people steal a billion dollars.”

Her acerbic wit can be genuinely funny. Regarding mountain climbing—an enthusiasm she cannot fathom—she says there’s simply no substitute for a warm shower and a well-cooked meal. “Oh, but the camera views are spectacular!” Plenty of photos already exist for that. She walks extensively in New York, but always to a destination.

Space confines me, as usual, but I think my drift is clear: Lebowitz is a voice worth knowing, irritating, insightful, and just plain irresistible.

—rj

My Passion for Literature: Reading’s Gifts

My fierce love for books has its ancient beginnings as a seven year old, sprawled on a Philly tenement floor, enthralled with a Christmas gift, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.

Moments ago I rediscovered this passage from France’s Michel Houellebecq, who has this special capacity to rattle the cages of accepted opinion—daring, provocative, forthright—writing novels you simply don’t walk away from.

I had read his Submission several years ago, an initial novel that launched his fame. His take on literature, a dying indulgence in a digital age, is poignant with meaning for me, for literature has surely been among life’s greatest gifts to me:

“…the special thing about literature, the major art form of a Western civilization now ending before our very eyes, is not hard to define. Like literature, music can overwhelm you with sudden emotion, can move you to absolute sorrow or ecstasy; like literature, painting has the power to astonish, and to make you see the world through fresh eyes. But only literature can put you in touch with another human spirit, as a whole, with all its weaknesses and grandeurs, its limitations, its pettinesses, its obsessions, its beliefs; with whatever it finds moving, interesting, exciting, or repugnant. Only literature can grant you access to a spirit from beyond the grave—a more direct, more complete, deeper access than you’d have in conversation with a friend” (Submission).

I have not found a more eloquent articulation of my own passion for literature and think often of what I would have missed had I not been introduced to literary reads—above all, to see past the literal text and be transported into a galaxy of resonance where words could mean beyond themselves, open new vistas, shaping life, capable of numinosity, a sense that life exceeds appearances, infinite in its labyrinthian corridors, a non-ending conversation with what is, has been, and will endure.

On Reading A.S. Byatt’s Possession: A Serendipitous Find

I’ve been reading A. S. Byatt’s Possession, published in 1990 and now hailed as a contemporary masterpiece.

Each year, I compile a carefully chosen list of books I hope to read. Possession was among them, though I can’t quite recall how I first came upon Byatt.

It has turned out to be an inspired choice—a rare literary mystery centered on a scholarly quest to uncover a suspected love affair, pieced together from newly discovered letters between the Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash, modeled on the married Robert Browning, and poet Christabel LaMotte, inspired by Christina Rossetti.

If such a relationship can be proven, it would mark a major coup for the novel’s modern-day protagonists, Roland and Maud, who join forces to solve this academic puzzle.

I won’t be a spoiler; I’m still reading, mesmerized by Byatt’s creative brilliance. Drawing on her vast knowledge of Victorian literature, she invents letters, diaries, and poems that feel astonishingly authentic—plausible echoes of Browning and Rossetti themselves.

There’s also a compelling counterpoint: as Roland and Maud pursue their literary investigation, they, too, seem to fall in love. And the suspense deepens with rival scholars competing to uncover the same secret.

Possession won the Booker Prize and became an international favorite, translated into more than thirty languages. A film version followed—all of which amazes me, as I wouldn’t have expected a novel so steeped in academia to achieve bestseller status.

Byatt, an academic for many years and fluent in several languages, left teaching in 1983 to write full time. Gifted with formidable imagination, she could also be intimidating in her intellectual precision and resistance to literary fashion. Critic, novelist, short-story writer, and essayist, she produced twenty-five books and, in 1999, was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) for her services to literature.

Her prose is detailed, introspective, and resonant—at times, poetic. More than any writer I’ve read, she possessed an extraordinary gift for mimicry, able to write convincingly in many voices.

I’ve especially liked this passage, though there are many others:

It is a dangerous business, reading of the passions of the dead. We try on their feelings, like garments, and for a moment we seem to stand in their light — and yet, as we close the book, we find ourselves once again alone in our own darkness, aware that our borrowed flame is only memory’s trick.

She is the writer’s writer.

As Jay Parini wrote in his 1990 New York Times review, “Possession is a tour de force that opens every narrative device of English fiction to inspection without, for a moment, ceasing to delight.”

–rj

What Happens When I Read James Baldwin

There are many excellent Black writers, deserving of their fame, but it’s James Baldwin I keep returning to for his wisdom, sensitivity, and eloquence.

Whenever I read him, I find cleansing—a washing away of grievances, the soothing salve of empathy for those visited by life’s unfairness, the unanticipated gifts of seeing with new eyes and walking in another’s shoes.

Reading Baldwin, I find connection. Suffering is never isolated; it is universal:

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people” (The Price of a Ticket, 1985).

—rj

On Reading Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses

I have now read Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, remarkable in its stark, yet lyrical beauty reminiscent of Hemingway and Faulkner, intense in its palpable confrontation of goodness with evil; an elegy for a lost way of life; a saga of idealism’s betrayal; of mythic passage from innocence into knowledge offering no redemption, apart from the grace of endurance and a refusal to forfeit honor.

The traditional rancher spreads of west Texas have fallen on hard times, threatening a way of life. The novel opens appropriately with the death of central protagonist John Grady Cole’s grandfather, a former baron among ranch owners. The ranch, grown to 18,000 acres in 1871, has been sold, an inheritance lost. Working with horses is the only life Grady knows:

The Grady name was buried with that old man the day the norther blew the lawnchairs over the dead cemetery grass. The boy’s name was Cole. John Grady Cole.

The first of a three novels known as the Border Trilogy, All the Pretty Horses underscores the death of the Western frontier, once ripe with promise of plenitude—fortunes to be made and dreams fulfilled.

Foregrounded in historical fact, a pastoral, unfenced way of life has fallen prey to change—the dividing of holdings among family, increased taxation, a drift of young people to the cities, mechanization, the invasion of industry, government’s encroachment, relentless droughts—above all, the railroad’s ubiquity, all of which McCarthy turns into metaphor for an agrarian culture bound by hard labor and a code of honor irretrievably lost. Metaphor becomes elegy.

All the Pretty Horses  narrates the journey of cowboys John Grady and his friend Lacey Rawlins from West Texas into Mexico, joined later by a mysterious youth, Jimmy Blevins, who owns a gun and rides an elegant bay mare, foreshadowing trouble ahead.

The novel abounds in resounding passages, poetic in resonance, like this one of stellar vastness, a cosmos indifferent to Man and of a fusion with nature and of a connection now severed:

He lay on his back in his blankets and looked out where the quartermoon lay cocked over the heel of the mountains. In that false blue dawn the Pleiades seemed to be rising up into the darkness above the world and dragging all the stars away, the great diamond of Orion and Cepella and the signature of Cassiopeia all rising up through the phosphorous dark like a sea-net. He lay a long time listening to the others breathing in their sleep while he contemplated the wildness about him, the wildness within.

Acquaintance with archetype helps readers tap more easily into the novel’s multiple levels of meaning—the hero archetype of initiation, trial, and return; the paradisiacal garden of northern Mexico’s La Purisima with its grassland abundance, grazing cattle of upwards of a thousand head, and 400 horses, attended by valeros, finding fulfillment in their labor; a siren temptress, Alejandra, the forbidden fruit, daughter of wealthy hacendado Don Héctor:

She passed five feet away and turned her fineboned face and looked full at him. She had blue eyes and she nodded or perhaps she only lowered her head.

The hero’s mentor appears, Dueña Alfonsa, great aunt of Alejandra, delivering stern warning from experience, that fate often annuls human wish and that economic and social determinism govern universally. Unlike traditional mentors, she’s unhelpful, even sinister, serving as forewarner and enforcer of social codes.

Not unexpectantly, trespass —Grady and Alejandra have become lovers—makes inevitable Grady’s expulsion from paradise, commencing an ordeal with uncertain outcome in a world where idealism is often judged as weakness and evil corrupts honor with impunity.

Unjustly imprisoned, Grady and Rawlins undergo brutal imprisonment for a crime they never committed. Blevins has  been executed earlier by a rogue officer. We have reached the novel’s nadir, a replay of mythic hell. A Mexican prison, governed by bribery and savagery, tests their courage and capacity to endure.

Dueña Alfonso buys their freedom, under condition he not return to La Purisima, only to have Grady resist and encounter Alejandra’s rejection.  Rawlings has returned to Texas.

Throughout, the novel remains faithful to its hero archetype—the hero, wiser now, returns to exact justice, wounded not only by a rifle’s bullets, but a pervasive knowledge of human capacity for caprice and injustice. Grady’s loss of his horses is inextricably linked to his identity. He returns to reclaim them, necessitating violence.

Restoration of wrong occurs, but not without a tarnished innocence and a sadness that knowledge brings.

Symbolism abounds, particularly through the horses of the narrative that give rise to the novel’s title. Virtual characters, they symbolize a dying way of life and nature’s nobility.

Grady’s affinity with horses affirms a vestige of traditional human communion with nature, once vibrant, but now vulnerable to a modern world in disconnect.

I have only one criticism, and that concerns its last fifty pages in which the prose splendor slackens and we arrive at a conclusion seemingly hurried and simplistic, anticlimactic in contrast to the mesmerizing narrative of its preceding pages that sustain a reader’s interest.

But make no mistake. McCarthy succeeds in writing an extraordinary novel, and I am embarrassed to have not caught-up with him sooner.

He passed from us in 2023 at age 89, having written twelve novels, several plays and short stories. Several of his books became movies.

He was his own person, disdaining celebrity status, living much of his life in poverty. Like Grady, he persevered. Recognition came late, beginning with All the Pretty Horses, which won the National Book Award, our nation’s highest literary award. He was 59 and now famous.

I intend to continue with his trilogy, then on to Blood Meridian, which many critics regard as his opus magnum.

Transcending time and geography, McCarthy rivals Faulkner as our greatest American author.

–rj