"All the Pretty Horses"

"Between the wish and the thing, the world lies waiting."

I heard one reader sum up Cormac McCarthy as “somewhere between John Grisham and literature.” After reading McCarthy for the first time, I can’t disagree more. I'm not sure if the comment was meant as a stab at the commercialization of literature, but McCarthy's writing can’t be judged by its movie adaptations. This is no mass-market, for-quick-consumption-only book. The reader is standing in the same vast world as the characters, and sometimes that world is hostile.
This is not your traditional western either. McCarthy gives us just enough to feel the terrain, to drink the coffee, to smell the horses and feel them moving under your body; but then he slowly takes that away; he defamiliarizes. It is the 1950s, WW2 has shattered many lives, and things are changing. A cowboy is just as likely to get a beer can thrown at him from a pickup truck then receive a tip of the hat. Our protagonist, John Grady Cole, is a displaced remnant of the past fleeing the onslaught of modernity. Cole has all the stoicism as someone out of Hemingway, and yet is far more driven. The story explores what it means to live as an alien in your own land, a land that your ancestors have tended for generations. It explores the generational divide between father and son, between idealism and defeat. It is no coincidence that the book is wrapped with images of the Comanche, vital and alive at the beginning, waiting and dying at the end.
The prose is beautiful. Something simple like walking through a tiny, run-down village takes on mythic proportions. Same with camping near a cook fire. Or brushing a horse. In fact, a lot of the scenes in this book take on mythic proportions. But it's never outlandish. It is always with respect for the odd and simple things. The writing is always controlled, fluid, sometimes threatening towards hallucinatory but never chaotic.
Much of his longer paragraphs in All the Pretty Horses are more reminiscent of Faulkner than any dime paperback Western. If Gabriel Garcia Marquez suffered a horrible loss, got into peyote and perhaps set his stories further north, then maybe something like McCarthy would happen. Probably not though.
His lucid descriptions of the environments are starkly juxtaposed against the terse dialogue that the characters often take part in, creating a very tiny human space in relation to the vast expanse of the plains.
No one I've read but McCarthy can be so bleak and yet still let hope slip out. He shows the blood and the loss, but the sun always rises.
This one is definitely recommended.

The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche

This was my first book-length reading of Nietzsche. As one of the most thrown-around names in literature and philosophy, Nietzsche is the "college" highbrow read. But for everything that his name evokes, his actual work was startlingly fresh, fascinating and generative. The book begins many of his most well-known ideas, including his ever-important revaluation of morality, his notorious skepticism, and his concept of "life as art." We see the wheels begin to turn of an idiosyncratic, brilliant, and over-the-top mind.
I didn't think I'd be drawn into a philosophical work about Greek Tragedy and Socrates, but his prose is infectious, like only very few writers can achieve. (For me, it was Whitman, Woolf, Hunter S. Thompson, Bukowski and Delany.) This only becomes more pronounced in his later works, such as Beyond Good and Evil.

An interesting addition that Nietzsche included in later publications of this book was a sort of apology attached to the beginning. In it he undertakes a mission that is admirable (and too rare) for any writer: self-critique. Not only that, but brutal self-critique. Freud said (hyperbolic statement activate) that Nietzsche was the most self-knowledgeable person that had ever lived; I'm not sure about that, but reading Nietzsche's prologue to this book, I do get the impression that Nietzsche's mind could not rest when he knew that it could do better.

If you're looking to get in to Nietzsche, this might be a good place to start (it was his first published book). If you're off-put by the accruements of ancient Greek tragedy, you could skip right to Beyond Good and Evil (it dives right in to the major components of his philosophy), or Thus Spoke Zarathustra (it's a story! - sort of. Definitely my favorite.)