No Country for Old Men (Cormac McCarthy)

After reading The Road and hearing the movie, No Country for Old Men, was receiving accolade after accolade, I was determined to read this 2005 McCarthy book. Boy, oh, boy was I glad I did. What a read. I had trouble putting it down. You know, those books that you read right before sleep, where your eyes grow heavy and your head starts to nod. Well, that just didn't happen with this book. In fact, I literally felt my adrenaline start to race, and my eyes scanned quicker, trying to keep pace with McCarthy's writing, flipping pages, curious as all hell to see what happens next. The dialogue is one of the best I've read, even though the truisms coming from bad-to-the-bone Anton Chigurgh and welder-on-the-run Llewelyn Moss sound like they could have come from the same character. I love what the book jacket depicts as the theme: "an enduring meditation on the ties of love and blood and duty that inform lives and shape destinies." The characters all seem to embody the belief that they are, not was or will be, just are. So be their demise. The only one that seems to escape this predetermined existentialism is Sheriff Bell, who follows the characters throughout the book, only to make his own decision on whether to stay with the killer til his own bitter end or to make a change that might save his own life, regardless of right or wrong.