I only started reading his books within the last year, but McCarthy quickly became one of my favorite authors. Suttree in particular I think is quite wonderful.

I only started reading his books within the last year, but McCarthy quickly became one of my favorite authors. Suttree in particular I think is quite wonderful. I also immensely enjoyed the Passenger and have been thinking about it for months. Allow me to quote some of the late critic Roger Ebert's remarks about him, which had an influence on me to pick up a McCarthy book: At first when I could not speak, I could not read easily, because sedation had undermined my attention span. I was depressed. I could turn on the TV, but why? My wife brought a wonderful DVD player to my hospital room, but I could not make myself watch movies. My life was stale and profitless. I would spend hours in a murky stupor. Knowing I had always been reading a book, my concerned wife began reading to me: Jane Austen, Charles Dickens. Curiously, my love of reading finally returned after I picked up Cormac McCarthy's Suttree, a book I had already read not long before my first surgery. Now I read it two more times. I was not "reading the same book." I was reentering the same experience, the same occult and visionary prose, the life of Suttree so urgently evoked. As rarely before, a book became tactile to me. When Suttree on his houseboat pulled a cord and brought up a bottle of orange soda pop from the cool river, I savored it. I could no longer taste. I tasted it more sharply than any soda I've ever really had. When Suttree stopped at the bus station for a grilled cheese, I ate it, and the pickle, and drank the black coffee. I began to live through this desperate man's sad life. https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/i-think-im-musing-my-mind https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/i-think-im-musing-my-... McCarthy, the heir of Faulkner, who mines the Southwest and Mexico for the way they can break your heart before they kill you. McCarthy is best known for his Border Trilogy, about men, horses, pain and loyalty; All the Pretty Horses was directed by Billy Bob Thornton. McCarthy's best book is said to be Blood Meridian, which Harold Bloom said he hated so much for its violence he threw it across the room twice, and then read it, declared it a masterpiece, and wrote the introduction for the Modern Library edition. My own favorite is Suttree, with its closely-woven mosaic of unusual and unknown words and its heartbreaking story. It's about a man fallen from grace who lives in a houseboat, catches catfish for a living, has hallucinatory alcoholic adventures and episodes of sentiment, pity and loyalty. https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/coen-country https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/coen-country As McCarthy does with the Judge, the hairless exterminator in his "Blood Meridian", and as in his "Suttree," especially in the scene where [...], the movie demonstrates how pitiful ordinary human feelings are in the face of implacable injustice. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/no-country-for-old-men-2007 https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/no-country-for-old-men-20...