Stuart reads and reviews a lot of books. He shares his insights on The 5 Angry Men episodes and talks about entire series he's read and selects his favorite book from them in Stuart’s Series Selection.

In 2024, he’s taking on a new challenge and is hoping you will join him on the journey.

Stuart has yet to read a Cormac McCarthy novel. He is going to rectify this by reading one each month throughout the year and hopes to start a BTB Cormac McCarthy Book Club.

How Will It Work?

Before each month, Stuart will let you know which book he is reading - the title and summary will be posted on this page.

If you join the book club, you will be:

  • the first to read his reviews

  • able to join him (and a few surprise guests) on a monthly Zoom call to discuss each book

  • eligible for giveaways.

Sign Up Today!

Please sign up via the form below. This will allow us to send you monthly updates (latest review, book for the month, Zoom invite, etc.).

If you have any questions, please let us know.

 
 

Monthly Reading List

April 2024
The Orchard Keeper by Cormac McCarthy (5/5/65)

Set is a remote community in rural Tennessee in the years between the two world wars, it is the story of a young boy and a bootlegger who, unbeknownst to either of them, has killed the boy's father.

The boy, John Wesley Rattner, and the outlaw, Marion Sylder–together with Rattner's Uncle Ather, who belongs to a former age in his communion with nature and his stoic independence–enact a drama that seems born of the land itself. All three are heroes of an intense and compelling celebration of values lost to time and industrialization.

March 2024
Cities of the Plain (pub. 5/12/98)

The setting is New Mexico in 1952, where John Grady Cole and Billy Parham are working as ranch hands. To the North lie the proving grounds of Alamogordo; to the South, the twin cities of El Paso and Juarez, Mexico. Their life is made up of trail drives and horse auctions and stories told by campfire light. It is a life that is about to change forever, and John Grady and Billy both know it.

The catalyst for that change appears in the form of a beautiful, ill-starred Mexican prostitute. When John Grady falls in love, Billy agrees—against his better judgment—to help him rescue the girl from her suavely brutal pimp. The ensuing events resonate with the violence and inevitability of classic tragedy. Hauntingly beautiful, filled with sorrow, humor and awe, Cities of the Plain is a genuine American epic.

February 2024
The Crossing (pub. 6/7/94)

In the bootheel of New Mexico hard on the frontier, Billy and Boyd Parham are just boys in the years before the Second World War, but on the cusp of unimaginable events. First comes a trespassing Indian and the dream of wolves running wild amongst the cattle lately brought onto the plain by settlers -- this when all the wisdom of trappers has disappeared along with the trappers themselves. And so Billy sets forth at the age of sixteen on an unwitting journey into the souls of boys and animals and men. Having trapped a she-wolf he would restore to the mountains of Mexico, he is long gone and returns to find everything he left behind transformed utterly in his absence. Except his kid brother, Boyd, with whom he strikes out yet again to reclaim what is theirs thus crossing into "that antique gaze from whence there could be no way back forever."

An essential novel by any measure, The Crossing is luminous and appalling, a book that touches, stops, and starts the heart and mind at once.

January 2024
All The Pretty Horses (pub. 4/21/92)

All the Pretty Horses is the tale of John Grady Cole, who at sixteen finds himself at the end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself. With two companions, he sets off for Mexico on a sometimes idyllic, sometimes comic journey to a place where dreams are paid for in blood.

Full List
January - All the Pretty Horses
February - The Crossing
March - Cities of the Plain
April - The Orchard Keeper
May - Sutree
June - Blood Meridian
July - No Country for Old Men
August - Outer Dark
September - Child of God
October - The Passenger
November - Stella Maris
December - The Road

Meet The Review Team