The Road (Oprah's Book Club)

An absolutely depressing book. I read the hype and should have taken a long nap. If you liked it, I would recommend some nice pictures online from one of the world's hundreds of refugee camps.

As an avid reader of 2-3 books per week I sometimes have difficulty finding new books that would interest me. One of my perennial favorites are books on the future, and that is why I chose to purchase this book.

To say I was disappointed would be a great understatement. This is not creative in the writing sense at all. Nothing is easier then to produce a piece that is 100% one thing or another with no nuance, no thought of entering even a clue into the writing of where the author is coming from. All is settled from page one. The worlds is a sewer and it ain't getting any better.

This book could have been written as a short story of 15 pages instead of a 250 pp novel that just keeps getting more and more gloomy.

I wanted to throw this book across the room so often - yet I couldn't release my grasp or even put it down for 2 days.

What would I do, my 5 year old son near starvation, who would I kill, could I end both our lives if I had no hope of anything short of a miserble tortured death? McCarthy forces the reader against these maddening questions with prose worthy of the best reporter. Hershey's Hiroshima is the only thing close. Simple spare prose, with occasionally arresting words made more remarkable by the flat relentless pace of surrounding colorless vocabulary. This book is not for everyone. Other fathers may find it too horrible to read. Even McCarthy tells us that once an image enters your head it won't leave. And you won't enjoy so many images he offers you. Yet he completely and deeply captures the primal abiding love of a father for his son. Deeper and more vital than civilization, food and shelter or even morality. What a book!

The work is just amazing. The landscape and tone are bleak and depressing. But somehow McCarthy manages to bring a more overpowering emotion in the face of such horror. The story is told in a simplistic manner, one that moves the story along easily and involves the reader. I have no idea how to describe the book. It seemed that the overwhelming sense of hope for the characters, conjured up so well by McCarthy that it seems unintentional, softens the blow of the hopelessness of their world. I couldn't put the book down; never have I been so moved by such a book.

This book, so carefully constructed to achieve almost mythic tone, is rendered unlistenable by the hamminess. Reading a book out loud does not require dramatization, and when such drama is pushed too far, as it is here,it diminishes and thwarts the power of the book.