For some reason I thought I’d like All the Pretty Horses, the award winning novel by Cormac Mccarthy.

That would be wrong.

… The plot is simple enough. John Grady Cole, a 16-year-old dispossessed Texan, crosses the Rio Grande into Mexico in 1949, accompanied by his pal Lacey Rawlins. The two precocious horsemen pick up a sidekick–a laughable but deadly marksman named Jimmy Blevins–encounter various adventures on their way south and finally arrive at a paradisiacal hacienda where Cole falls into an ill-fated romance. …

The writing is excellent. But the plot plods and has nothing more to redeem it than tired “folk wisdom of uneducated cowboys” cuteness. The last time that engaged me, Clint Eastwood was a young man.

Thumbs down.

All the Pretty Horses

I bought it as an audio book. But since no one has (yet) come up with a convincing enough neologism to claim the prize, I cannot VERBalize what I did with Pretty Horses.

… “ristened” … GAK.