All the Pretty Horses
by Cormac McCarthy
Paperback- $10.87

The national bestseller and the first volume in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, All the Pretty Horses is the tale of John Grady Cole, who ...

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  "Ugh....boring, so boring..." by photospice (see profile) 07/19/08

What a boring, boring book. I love a book with lots of description, but good grief, this book was pages and pages of wash, rinse and repeat. Wake up, ride, break for lunch, ride more, break for dinner, sleep, wake up, ride...etc....pages of this. Once this stopped it was a ton of incomplete relationships, vague conversations, and lots and lots of horse.

This book was a pain to read. It got decent in the 3rd chapter (and mind you, there are only 4 chapters in this book). The releationships were still incomplete, the conversations were still vague but at least around this time there was some action going on. But still, boring.

And seriously, I think Carmac McCarthy owns stock in the word "and". There are some sentences that run 10 and 11 lines long and contain an equal amount of "and's". Most of these run-on sentences add nothing to the story which makes them even harder to stomach.

Honestly if you don't read this book you won't be missing anything. I felt like I wasted a ton of my time reading a bad book when I could have been enjoying a better read.

I would recommend this book for only two reasons. One, some people love this book. They think it’s beautiful and touching. Second, even though it’s tough to read, it’s interesting enough to discuss and "rewrite" in your bookclub discussion.

 
  "Discuss how to make it better, not how great it was." by greeneyes82286 (see profile) 07/31/08

"Amazing read." Really? I fell asleep through the first 25 pages and had to watch the equally ridiculous film just so I would know what people in my discussion group were talking about.

 
  "Story of a 16 year old boy who runs away from home to work on a ranch in Texas" by marsuzlb (see profile) 08/01/08

This book was very boring. The author did not build the characters throughout the book. Nothing resolved at the end of the story. I'm disappointed I spent money on this book.

 
  "his writing is poetry, his cadence and delivery an acquired taste" by melanieseibel (see profile) 02/04/09

Our book club was split; half loved it, half couldn't get through it. Someone bought the book on CD and we listened to a few minutes of it; that helped many of us get a better understanding of the people and the writing.

 
  "Coming of age in the west" by donnadeleon (see profile) 02/04/09

This is not a genre I would normally choose to read, but it was very well written and made for a good group discussion. Beautiful descriptions of the landscape and day-to day events really captured the flavor of these young men's lives.

 
  "All the Pretty Horses by Cormac Mc Carthy" by pleasure4me (see profile) 06/16/11

A western about a young boy coming of age and his adventures in Mexico.

 
  "Not my cup of tea" by kffcmf (see profile) 01/09/15

There was no depth in this novel. The character development was minimal, and I didn't really care about the protagonist. The writing style is marked by a lack of punctuation and included quite a bit of dialogue in Spanish, both of which I found annoying,

 
  "All the pretty horses" by rnns1999 (see profile) 01/09/15

Beautifully written and descriptive. Slow pace which made it hard to get through

 
  "" by JPMay (see profile) 08/27/22

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