My first reaction, without knowing about the book, was actually to say, “Let’s check the library!” We usually go every Saturday or every other weekend, so I told him to look it up next time we were there. I had never heard of Cormac McCarthy before and didn’t know anything about Blood Meridian. At the library, he went to the computer to search the catalog but couldn’t find it. He even asked at the front desk, but the staff told him it wasn’t available in their system. That surprised me. Why wouldn’t a public library carry a book considered a modern classic?

So I did what many parents might do when faced with that kind of moment: I went online and started researching.

That’s when I learned about McCarthy’s reputation and the nature of the book, its literary acclaim, its philosophical depth, but also its intense and unfiltered portrayal of violence. I also found out that many school districts and library systems choose not to carry Blood Meridian because of the violence. At first, I told him it was probably not appropriate for someone his age. He didn’t wait to show how he felt. It wasn’t just disapproval, it was more like a quiet disappointment, a sense that I didn’t trust him to handle something difficult. But then I remembered what it was like to be a curious teenager myself, reading books that were way beyond my “recommended” level and learning deeply from them. So I told him to give me a little more time to decide. I didn’t want to shut down his curiosity. I just wasn’t ready yet to say yes.

A Work of Literary Power

After more research and reading deeper into critical essays, I found that Blood Meridian isn’t just violent, it’s widely considered one of the greatest American novels of the 20th century. Critics often compare McCarthy to William Faulkner, whose The Sound and the Fury I read not long ago. I’ve come to American literature later in life, Spanish is my first language, and growing up, I mostly read Latin American and Spanish authors. I still remember my grandfather telling me to “read the great classics first.” That’s how I ended up reading Moby-Dick as a young reader, even if I didn’t fully understand it at the time. While researching McCarthy, I noticed that many critics also compare his prose style to Herman Melville (the author of Moby-Dick), especially in its poetic cadence and philosophical depth. That made me pause. This wasn’t just a book with violence. It was a book with weight.

Yes, it is violent, but not without purpose. The violence is historical. The novel follows “the Kid,” a 14-year-old runaway who joins a scalp-hunting expedition during a time of real chaos and expansion along the U.S.-Mexico border. The book doesn’t glorify bloodshed. It reflects on it, interrogates it. It holds a mirror up to the American myth of the Wild West, and smashes that mirror in slow motion.

So I made a decision. I bought it. But I didn’t just hand it to him, I bought it on Kindle.

Why Kindle?

Buying the book on Kindle was a deliberate choice. First, because he and I both have Kindles, so I could purchase it once and we could each read it at our own pace. Second (and maybe more importantly), because McCarthy’s prose is challenging. It’s rich, layered, and archaic at times. With Kindle, we can tap any word for a definition, explore references through Wikipedia, and annotate freely as we read. It transforms the experience into something immersive and self-guided, especially useful for a curious young reader.

And this wasn’t a deal in the traditional sense; there was no bargaining, no exchange of promises or rewards. It wasn’t “I’ll buy the book if you do X.” It was more like a quiet agreement between us, a shared project: we’d both read Blood Meridian on our own time, and then talk about it together on the weekends. Not as a lesson. Not as a school assignment. But as fellow readers—one adult, one teen—grappling with a monumental book, side by side.

From Video Games to Literature

Here’s the other layer: my son has played Red Dead Redemption, a game set in a similarly lawless and morally complex American frontier. I’ve written before about the power of video games as educational tools, especially for language learning. But what strikes me now is how Red Dead Redemption prepared him for this book, not with vocabulary or plot structure, but with questions. In the game, you choose: mercy or vengeance? Order or chaos? Hero or outlaw?

Blood Meridian strips away that choice. In McCarthy’s world, the characters are trapped in cycles of violence and war, and readers are left to ask: Is this who we are? Or who we were? And can literature, like gameplay, be a place to explore moral landscapes, without giving easy answers?

What makes this experience even more meaningful is that, just as we’re now reading Blood Meridian together, we’ve also shared time playing that game together. When we started Red Dead Redemption, my son leaned into the outlaw path, making those darker choices the game offers. That’s natural. It’s a game about outlaws, and he wanted to explore that world fully. But I took a different approach. I told him from the start that I wanted to try to make money without robbing or killing unnecessarily. I wanted to hunt, trade, help strangers on the road, still surviving in a tough world, but making different choices.

And that became its own lesson. We both played the same game, in the same world, but made different choices, and we talked about those choices. That, to me, is the real power of open-world games like Red Dead Redemption: they can teach us about consequence, history, and morality not through lectures, but through living those decisions, in a virtual form.