Book Review (E-mail from John Welsch): "All The Pretty Horses" (1992) by Cormac McCarthy

Date: Sat, 28 Jan 2006 16:53:08 -0800
From: John Welsch < _________@att.net >
To: James Welsch < __________@yahoo.com >
CC: Lee Welsch < _______@earjuice.com >, Sue Welsch < _______________@yahoo.com >
Subject: Reading

James,

[...]

One of the books you gave me to carry home from Saint Louis, "All the Pretty Horses", looked interesting, so I started it on the plane home. I just finished it. I had to read it with my Franklin electronic Spanish dictionary near me to work my way through the Mexican dialog. About one in five words didn't translate. I called them "texmex" words. At a Rotary chili dinner last Thursday, I was telling Alan Tiras (he and Natalie are from Texas) about it, and he said that "texmex" is the food, and the language is "Spanglish" or "Texican".

I rather liked the coming of age book, and really enjoyed Texas dialect and descriptions of the horses and country of south Texas and north Mexico. How did you get thru the Spanglish?

Lee gave me a book for Xmas "What the Dormouse Said" by John Markoff. It's premise is that the 1960's counterculture shaped the 1970's computer revolution in the area around Stanford. I've finished the Introduction and started the first chapter. I remember lots of the characters, especially Doug Engelbart, the inventor of the mouse, whom I used to jog and eat lunch with on the Stanford practice track. I'm looking forward to reading it between bouts of TurboTax.

Love, Dad