A critical blind spot, perhaps

My view of Cormac McCarthy: exasperating.

All the Pretty Horses was a wonder. I thought McCarthy was among the stars in the American sky.

No Country for Old Men was unreadable.

I start a lot of books that I don’t finish. Many books are not for me — no harm, no foul.

But it’s unusual for there to be so much promise in a book that I read it almost to the end and give up with the finish line in sight.

On that quirky scale, No Country for Old Men holds a record. I’ve never read further into a novel before  deciding that my response was not good or bad or awful, but simply no.