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/
I do love a good Western. If you get a chance, listen to the audiobook for Lonesome Dove, or watch the 1989 miniseries; it's pretty faithful to the book as well. My absolute favorite western of all time.
The book begins with a great quote. “All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past, but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream.”
The author originally set out to 'deconstruct' the American western and accidentally wrote one of the best westerns yet writ.