Book Review: "The Road," by Cormac McCarthy

Very good. It's about a man and his son trying to survive after a disaster that has basically wiped out America.

The whole book has a grey feel to it. Everything is dirty, ash is everywhere, and there is no hope of anything ever getting better. The one positive thing in the book is the love between the father and son.

The writing style is very different. The sentences are choppy, but once I decided to read it like poetry, envisioning these sentence fragments on different lines and not trying to plow through it like I would a normal novel, I found it was actually well-written. One of my favorite passages in the book (as far as the writing went, not necessarily the content) was this:

"He tried to think of something to say but he could not. He'd had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever."

"The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality." - What a beautiful sentence.

The book is haunting. It makes you think (and feel). What happens to a country when there's no country left? What happens to the people? It kind of makes you wonder what the end of the world will be like.

It's easy reading. (The fact that there aren't chapters, just page breaks, makes it go even faster, because there's nowhere to stop.) Once I got past the style, I couldn't put it down.

I would recommend this to anyone who's open to taking book recommendations. (If you aren't that kind of person, you might not like it.) It's good.