Tolstoy, Cormac McCarthy, and Happy New Year

A few days ago, I finally finished Anna Karenina. And by 'finally', I don't mean that I got to the end of it and thought 'whew! I'm glad that's over with!' - I actually felt like the book ended where it needed to. Like the end of the book wasn't the end of the characters' stories, but it was the end of my window into their lives, and that was ok. I think it has the be the mark of a fantastic author when you feel like that, and I'm pretty sure I don't often feel this way. I keep thinking about Harry Potter, and how the story is fantastic and exciting, but full of holes (don't hate me!), like the infrastructure of the story isn't quite substantial enough - like if I look too closely, it'll fall apart. Really what I mean by that is that I don't feel like the characters exist outside of the books, which probably sounds ridiculous and strange, but at the end of Anna Karenina, I felt like the characters would go on, like I'd just looked away and they would continue with their lives. When I finished Harry Potter though, that was all - they can't exist without me to read their stories. It isn't just because Anna Karenina is based in real life and Harry Potter is fiction - I've read a few fantasy books where I felt like the characters would go on without me reading them into being (Lord of the Rings, for example, and some books by David Eddings). I guess what I'm really doing is mourning the loss of my old way of reading, which was just for the story. I know when in my life it changed, but it just keeps getting worse (where by worse, I suppose I mean better, in a way) - it's nice to read something and know that it's good literature, but it's incredibly sad to go back to books I loved when I was younger and find them to be pale shadows of my memories of them. (heh, it's kind of like going to N64 after playing things on the xbox, or PS3 [what sad comparisons I'm making right now] in terms of graphics)

At any rate, Tolstoy is, as I've said, a phenomenal author whom I'm completely in awe of. Shortly after I finished Anna Karenina I picked up Comrac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men, and it was kind of amusing to compare the two of them - Tolstoy is incredibly verbose, but not to the point of excess. Not a single word is unnecessary or out of place. McCarthy, however, is anything but verbose, and perhaps because of this, his passages hold just as much weight, and points where he does write longer passages stand out in both importance and ideas conveyed. What I'm trying to say is that I'm equally in awe of both of these authors for their incredibly different, yet incredibly effective styles, and I'm even more in awe of the fact that we can combine words that everyone knows in so many different ways and get so many different meanings out of them! I know that probably seems like a no-brainer, but man. I think that Tolstoy and McCarthy have styles on completely different sides of the spectrum, but they're both incredibly effective at conveying their ideas. Words are awesome.

I'm always a little bit surprised at how much Cormac McCarthy is able to say with his often short sentences (although actually, I think that sentence length is tied to landscape and plot - he does have longer, sweeping sentences that describe picturesque vistas and open plains - like in All the Pretty Horses) but in times of conflict and fear, the sentences tend to be short (like in The Road, and often in No Country for Old Men). Anyway, CM often talks about life, fate, and faith, and No Country was no different, although it didn't have the obvious focus of The Sunset Limited. It was interesting to think about the importance that Chigurh placed on the coin he tossed for the man's life in the gas station - interesting to think about the journey that the coin took, interesting to think about what Chigurh was thinking ("interesting"). I don't know if this will make sense, or if I'm just rambling on about things that everyone knows, or maybe I've rambled about this on here already, but it's such a backwards way to look at things - I mean, yes, it is fantastic to look back on events and see how things came together, fascinating to look at the trip of the coin and see it's seemingly impossible journey from the metal in the rocks to the coin deciding the man's life, but to go all the way from point B to point A and say that A came about because of B is false. Oh man, I remember now, heh. It's the anthropic principle, and I have thoroughly discussed this, but not on here. : P

Anyway. Happy new year, hey? It's been quite a year, and I mean that in the best way possible :). I've made my resolutions - boring 'be healthier', and 'do your homework on time' ones, but also 'read more for pleasure' and such like that. It's a reasonable list, and things that I look forward to doing. It'll be a good year, I'm pretty sure :D.