These were the best books I've read/listened to this year.
Set at the US/Mexico border, a lot about tradition vs modernity, early American cowboy life, and the meaning of life and suffering. Helps to give grounding back to the early American spirit, showing even 100 years ago Americans felt parts of that slipping away and were trying to keep it alive in the face of encroaching modernity that was taming man.
**All the Pretty Horses** - John Grady Cole is a character I'll never forget, goes through hell and back after going down to Mexico on horseback with a friend. Voice narrator is very good
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3HyI2BQim4
**The Crossing** (first part is the boy taking a captured wolf to Mexico, then a really good story about a man who went through tremendous suffering, then realizing that's how God mercifully drew him out of the world, a priest comes to talk to him and realizes this broken old hermit was closer to God than he was, this is sometimes seen as McCarthy's most important book but often overshadowed by the more popular ones).
https://hdaudiobooks.net/book-crossing/
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
“He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activites in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
“So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing
“Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot be fled nor hid from.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing