SailorScoutMandy | 782 Posted December 4, 2021 Share Posted December 4, 2021 No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy In his blistering new novel, Cormac McCarthy returns to the Texas-Mexico border, the setting of his famed Border Trilogy. The time is our own, when rustlers have given way to drug-runners and small towns have become free-fire zones. One day, Llewellyn Moss finds a pickup truck surrounded by a bodyguard of dead men. A load of heroin and two million dollars in cash are still in the back. When Moss takes the money, he sets off a chain reaction of catastrophic violence that not even the law–in the person of aging, disillusioned Sheriff Bell–can contain. As Moss tries to evade his pursuers–in particular a mysterious mastermind who flips coins for human lives–McCarthy simultaneously strips down the American crime novel and broadens its concerns to encompass themes as ancient as the Bible and as bloodily contemporary as this morning’s headlines. No Country for Old Men is a triumph. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SailorScoutMandy | 782 Posted December 7, 2021 Author Share Posted December 7, 2021 Off topic but for those that like fantasy and Sanderson. Did you see this? New Sanderson novel Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reed Rothchild | 9,546 Editorials Team · Posted December 7, 2021 Share Posted December 7, 2021 20 hours ago, SailorScoutMandy said: Off topic but for those that like fantasy and Sanderson. Did you see this? New Sanderson novel Yep. Still need to read Mistborn 4-5 though 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reed Rothchild | 9,546 Editorials Team · Posted December 18, 2021 Share Posted December 18, 2021 Finished it. The movie follows it very closely, so there weren't very many surprises - other than the book being a little more revealing with several characters' fates. There's also a few sections that kind of go nowhere that the movie cut. Overall I'd say it was about on par with the other McCarthy I've read: The Road and Blood Meridian. Unsure if I'll read The Crossing or All the Pretty Horses. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brickman | 3,993 Posted December 18, 2021 Share Posted December 18, 2021 2 hours ago, Reed Rothchild said: Finished it. The movie follows it very closely, so there weren't very many surprises - other than the book being a little more revealing with several characters' fates. There's also a few sections that kind of go nowhere that the movie cut. Overall I'd say it was about on par with the other McCarthy I've read: The Road and Blood Meridian. Unsure if I'll read The Crossing or All the Pretty Horses. I haven’t read the crossing yet but can recommend reading all the pretty horses. Also the sunset limited if you haven’t read that. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PII | 1,886 Posted December 29, 2021 Share Posted December 29, 2021 Finally picked this book up a few days ago... Compelling and easy to get into. Some choice words: “I think that when the lies are all told and forgot the truth will be there yet.” p.123 “Do you really care?” “About your husband?” “About my husband. Yes.” “Yes mam. I do. The people of Terrell County hired me to look after em. That’s my job. I get paid to be the first one hurt. Killed, for that matter. I’d better care.” pp. 132 - 133 “Nineteen is old enough to know that if you have got somethin that means the world to you it’s all that more likely it’ll get took away. Sixteen was, for that matter.” pp. 133 - 134 [so much good banter in this book, but after a while these people start to seem like robots...] “Yessir. I understand that.” “You understand that.” “Yessir.” “That’s Good. I’m glad I’ve got your attention.” “Yessir. You have my attention.” p. 140 “People anymore you talk about right and wrong they’re liable to smile at you.” p.158 He ruled out Moss because he thought Moss was almost certainly dead. That left the police. Or some agent of the Matacumbe Petroleum Group. Who must think that he thought that they thought that he thought they were very dumb. He thought about that. p. 171 [if you can relate to thinking this way you may be a psychopath.] “I used to tell em that havin your wife and children killed and scalped and gutted like fish has a tendency to make some people irritable but they didn’t seem to know what I was talkin about.” p.195 “…back in the thirties… Had this questionnaire about what was the problems with teaching in the schools…. ….And the biggest problems they could name was things like talkin in class and runnin in the hallways. Chewin Gum. Copyin homework. Things of that nature. So they got one of them forms that was blank and printed up a bunch of em and sent em back out to the same schools. Forty years later. Well, here come the answers back. Rape, arson, murder. Drugs. Suicide. So I think about that. Because a lot of the time ever when I say anything about how the world is goin to hell in a handbasket people will just sortof smile and tell me I’m gettin old. That it’s one of the symptoms. But my feelin about that is that anybody that can’t tell the difference between rapin and murderin people and chewin gum has got a whole lot bigger of a problem than what I’ve got. Forty years is not a long time neither. Maybe the next forty of it will bring some of em out from under the ether. If it ain’t too late. pp. 195 - 196 “I think the truth is always simple. It has pretty much got to be. It needs to be simple enough for a child to understand. Otherwise it’d be too late. By the time you figured it out it would be too late.” p. 249 “Not everyone is suited to this line of work. The prospect of outsized profits leads people to exaggerate their own capabilities. In their minds. They pretend to themselves that they are in control of events where perhaps they are not. And it is always one’s stance upon uncertain ground that invites the attentions of one’s enemies. Or discourages it.” p.253 “You make it like it was the coin. But you’re the one.” “It could have gone either way.” “The coin didn’t have no say. It was just you.” “Perhaps. But look at it my way. I got here the same way the coin did.” p.258 [a psychopath can rationalize anything.] “Anyway, you never no what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.” p.267 “There’s two kinds of people that don’t ask a lot of questions. One is too dumb to and the other don’t need to.” p. 298 “…in law school they try and teach you not to worry about right and wrong but just follow the law and I said I wasn’t so sure about that. He thought about that and he nodded and he said that he pretty much had to agree with that lawyer. He said that if you don’t follow the law right and wrong won’t save you. Which I guess I can see the sense of. But it don’t change the way I think. Finally I asked him if he knew who Mammon was. And he said: "Mammon?" “Yes. Mammon. “You mean like in God and Mammon?” “Yessir.” “Well”, he said, “I can’t say as I do. I know it’s in the bible. Is it the devil?” “I don’t know. I’m goin to look it up. I got a feelin’ I ought to know who it is. He kindly smiled and he said: “You sound like he might be getting ready to take up the spare bedroom." “Well”, I said, “that would be one concern. In any case I feel I need to familiarize myself with his habits.” pp. 298 - 299 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PII | 1,886 Posted December 29, 2021 Share Posted December 29, 2021 (edited) Somewhere along the line while reading this I found myself imagining the face of Javier Bardem and remembered a time circa 2007 or 2008 that I'd happened to catch the last couple minutes of a movie my friend was watching on his laptop. So I looked it up and yep Bardem is in the movie and the same scene I saw turned up in the book so that must have been it. I read a little on Wikipedia under "Cast" and it said that an actor named Mark Strong had been on standby to possibly play the role of Anton Chigurh because Bardem was uncertain for a time. Interestingly, his (wikipedia) pic. looks remarkably similar to how I originally imagined Chigurh based on the author's descriptions. Edited October 9, 2022 by PII Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Aguy | 773 Posted January 1, 2022 Share Posted January 1, 2022 I'm a couple hours late but finished it this morning. I'm not a big fan of McCarthy as his continued distain of punctuation perks me. I started The Road years ago and quite half way through partly because of it. This one was better as it had a story and somewhat of an ending, although the last 20% of the book did nothing for me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PII | 1,886 Posted January 2, 2022 Share Posted January 2, 2022 8 hours ago, Aguy said: his continued distain of punctuation I wasn't particularly crazy about that either. My theory is that this coupled with the frequent short sentences of dialogue (good banter) was an attempt to make the text look "clean" and unintimidating to those who are not frequent readers. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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