Three days ago, I should note, I finished my 800th book, counting from the time when I started keeping track of such things, back in 2015.
You’ve heard of the book, maybe read it, likely seen the movie at least. (I haven’t done the latter yet, having wanted to read the book prior to seeing the movie. I guess I’m old-fashioned that way.) No Country For Old Men was a really good piece of prose, kept my interest and rang true … most of the time. But there were moments where the resonance was more tinny than bell-like, and in the end I reckon I found the book’s extreme pessimism to just not be all that convincing. Don’t get me wrong; I’m as likely as the next guy (moreso, maybe) to give credence to even the most depressing, bleakest view of humanity. Heck, I don’t even think of Leonard Cohen’s “The Future” as prophecy, just a likely laundry list of what’s to come. But Cormac McCarthy seems to want to have it both ways in this taut almost thriller. The weariness of aging is overwhelmed by the amorality of the future age, but McCarthy gives the amoral antagonist too much puissance, kind of like those conspiracy theories where the evil group is responsible for just pert near everything bad that ever happened or ever will happened. Weariness, pessimism, depression: all these are appropriate responses to the current Last Age. But the protagonist of No Country For Old Men seems to both give up too easy, and to carry a burden just a tad bit too heavily for its actual weight. Don’t forget that Yeats’s poem, from which the title of this novel was taken, is about that old man poet’s decision to make himself a post-Christian morality and mythology, to renew himself in an imagined Byzantium and shed the shackles of his actual time and place. But the novel is a good read for all that. I’m curious to see how the movie works with this material. (Don’t tell me.)
In this last set of a hundred books, once again, I’ve been reading a lot—a whole lot—of mysteries. Almost half of these books (as usual, setting aside the comic books and graphic novels I read) were in the Mystery & Thriller genre. Partly this is acause I’m reading most of my books at work, during my lunch, and that means light reading. Partly it’s because the deeper books take longer to read, maybe.
My reading pace was about the same as for the previous century of books: 259 days to read this last hundred, compared to 264 days for the set before. I did read a couple thousand more pages in the latest group, so we’ll see how this all shakes down when (and if) I do my further analysis. (I never did get around to doing an analysis of the books from #s 601-700, so we’ll see, we’ll see. You can see the list of those books, at least, here.)
1 Book per 2.59 Days
Ta-ta for now.
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