Cormac McCarthy has died

Dude had a pretty long life and wrote a couple of absolutely top-tier books.

The mid-00's comeback he had with The Road and No Country For Old Men, along with their almost immediate adaptations, really felt like it was giving him his flowers before he died. Happy he got that.

Rest in peace.

I had a harebrained fantasy of taking a sabbatical to do a visiting fellowship at the Santa Fe Institute while he was there. I figured he would like talking brain-behavioral science and I would like hearing anything he had to say, plus would have gotten to talk with mathematicians and other technical experts with a visionary tinge. I never did it (too early in my career to try), but it was fun to imagine.

My spouse got me his final novel(s), which he had the prescience to announce as such, and I almost started reading them a few days ago. Now I know it will be a memorial read, also content that he assumed it mostly would be.

I haven’t read all his novels but the ones I’ve read are powerful and unique. Definitely a loss in the literary world. I love that he knew how to write about truly evil characters in such a captivating way. There will be an redness in the West tonight

And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.

This line always filled me with so much hope, and yet so much sadness at the same time. Part of me desperately years to believe that someone is holding that fire out there, but I also know how idealistic that is. But what are we without these ideals and hopes and dreams? What else are we to do?

I can't think of many texts that I've read that make me feel the litany of emotions that this man's work have, and he was able to do it in five simple words. "And then I woke up." Like, fuck man.

Here's to you, Cormac McCarthy.

McCarthy was such a unique and powerful writer. I have no way to properly communicate this, but I loved how he was able to present characters with the simplicity of Hemingway's Nick Adams while still allowing them to participate in extremely complex, often violent circumstances.

I know he had a long life, 89 is a grand age to live to especially when it seems like he was still pretty sharp even into his old age but McCarthy is definitely one of the best authors to have lived in my opinion.

I remember my English teacher having a private word with me on the way out of class in high school as I'd mentioned I'd like to read a post-apocalyptic novel and handed me his own copy of The Road, telling me I'd love it. I gave it back to him before the end of the week telling him I'd finished it and loved it! One of my best high-school memories.

I got my own copy of the book along with No Country for Old Men for my birthday that year and read The Road again after finishing No Country for Old Men.

A couple years later and I got Blood Meridian. What an unbelievable novel, off the charts violent, gritty and unforgiving but a work of art. Judge Holden has to go down as one of the scariest and greatest villians in literature, just a larger than life monster! I need to read it again once I'm done with the series of books I'm on now.

I was first exposed to Cormac McCarthy in high school. All the Pretty Horses was a summer reading book my sophomore year. My friends hated it, but I devoured it and then everything else he'd written at the time. I might be a weirdo that considers The Road to be one of my least favorite McCarthy books. The Border Trilogy books will always be my favorites.

Oh no :(
The Road was a book that I feel like had affected a lot of my growth as a person, and probably one of the very few books I read in high school.

My favorite author. His work means a lot to me. One of a kind.

Damn, and it was just recently announced that he would be writing the screenplay for the Blood Meridian adaptation.

I should get around to reading The Passenger.

I'll never, ever forget reading The Road. I read it during a holiday trip with my dad, who I hadn't seen in a couple years and who was beginning to forget bigger and bigger stuff due to early dementia. The weather during the trip was grey and oppressive & it just underscored the bleak setting of the book. I remember seeing my dad fading away before my eyes, occasionally forgetting where he was and how he got there, only to come to himself and recenter himself amongst his closest family. Having The Road as my book companion during that time was simultaneously existentially devastating and transformative. I don't think I'm the same person on the other side. It gave me a greater sense of connection to the idea of mortality, personal ethics and meaning, and "carrying the fire."

Rest in peace to one of the giants of our time.

Rest in peace, Blood Meridian was actually the book that got me back into reading books. I saw it recommended somewhere and decided to try out the ebook while I was bored, despite being one of the hardest books I've ever read I loved it and started reading his other work and more books in general. Shame he didn't get to finish the Blood Meridian screenplay.

I’ve heard so many good things about The Road. RIP.

I literally just read The Road on the recent Memorial Day weekend. It was a good read, although his post-apocalyptic view seemed a bit more pessimistic that the actual social nature of humans (as expressed, e.g., in Jeremy Rifkin's The Empathic Civilization and David Livingstone Smith's Less than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave and Exterminate Others).

I have read only Blood Meridian, The Road and Child of God, but just based on the strength of these three I can safely conclude that he’s one of my favourite authors and quite possibly my favourite American author.