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This prompted me to seek out and find blog posts and Reddit screeds by other readers who, like myself, picked up All the Pretty Horses, thought it was awful, and have been reliably confused by the Cormac MaCarthy's fame and success ever since.

Refreshingly, I'm not alone!

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What don't you like about his writing? Is there an example of an author you do like?

When he gets to describing the desert especially, I am agog. I think he's brilliant.

I haven't read All the Pretty Horse but No Country for Old Men is in my top 5 favorite books of all time. The movie is great but couldn't really do the book justice. The opening monologue from Sherriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones's character) is just one of many in the book, with Bell telling stories about his past as a lawman and soldier and the sorts of people he encountered at the start of each chapter. His monologues provide a context to everything that's happening in the story, making it clear that it's about the nature of evil and what men can (and can't) do about it.

No movie can do a book justice, movies inherently lack fidelity. There just isn’t the same information density, at least not in a way that makes an interesting movie. I find it interesting that even this movie gets the same criticism; the Coen brothers described the screenwriting process as “one of us holding the book flat so the other can read and type at the same time”.

Hmm, I don't think his border trilogy is as good as Blood Meridian or Suttree, but not awful, just mannered. I will admit to finding The Road fairly disappointing, maybe it's just the usual problem of serious-literary-author-does-genre.

Cormac MaCarthy writes terrible novels that are good to the last word.

“All the pretty horses” is “Blood Meridian” but it’s a young adult fiction.

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