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Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, the Evening Redness in the West
wisdom and beauty
Reading books has always been a way of knowing the world for me. I have been to many countries real and imagined through my reading. I have heard souls speak their truths. Books are a portal into the minds of others, into other ways of thinking and other ways of knowing the world.
Before I ever went back to college, I read voraciously, usually 2–3 books a week. Books were the source of my education at that time. Of the many books I have read, one stands out.
Cormac McCarthy’s novel, Blood Meridian, The Evening Redness in the West is one of my favorite books. I would like to read it again, but every time I buy a copy, I end up pressing it into someone’s hands and telling the recipient, “You must read this book!”
As a writer, McCarthy is half savage, half saint, and half God. His works are packed with wisdom and mysterious, deep statements that make his readers look deep into their souls. Blood Meridian is one of the few novels that has been buried within me, that makes my heart beat, that stops my breath.
His prose reaches out and presses on the soul’s sore spots: fear, loneliness, the feeling that we are not much in this vast universe.
