The Road (Oprah's Book Club)

This post-apocalyptic journey is written in prose, but I found it quite poetic. Fitch presented a fascinating picture of a very real (to me) possible future. McCarthy used almost no puncuation besides periods, and mainly very simple tenses. This gave the feeling of no past and no future, each day continuing with no change, and no thoughts of life beyond the moment.

This is not an uplifting story and you realize from very early in the book that things are going from very bad to much worse.

However, the storytelling is fabulous and you cannot help rooting for the main characters, all the while knowing there is no good way out of this mess.

The narrative style is much different from most books I've ever read, but even so the book read at an extremely fast pace.

Highly recommended.

I have read quite a few "end of the world" - "post-apocalyptic" novels, this one has to rank near the bottom. The book starts leaving you with the feeling you have dropped into the middle of a story. Even worse, the characters history never is revealed. Furthermore, the events in society that put the characters in their predicament are also never revealed and left to the imagination. The book has a very simplistic writing style consisting almost entirely of dialogue, often simply back-and-forth of one to three word responses. It's repetitive, shallow and it has a completely unfulfilling ending. After all the hype, I was very disappointed. I wouldn't recommend it to anybody. I don't understand why people were so impressed with this novel? If you're looking for something in this genre, I would recommend going with some of the much better novels out there such as: "Lucifer's Hammer" by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, "The Stand" by Stephen King or "The Rift" by Walter J. Williams.

This book has incredable depth and many dimensions. McCarthy hits home combining some comedy with some dramatic thought provoking moments on life and death. An incredible journey. Although sad, very uplifting at the same time. I highly recommend this book. This is the third book I have read recently on religion. Two others that are similar in style and also great reads are The Shack, by William Young and Larry the Penguin Searches for the Meaning of Life, by Charles Belser. It's not often you read three wonderful books in a row, but each of them left me with a different perspective on life and religion. If you are seeking answers however, these books may leave you with more questions.

This must have been a slow year for Pulitzer submissions if this book won the prize. The book is a slow moving rip-off of S.M. Stirling's "Dies The Fire" series (minus the plot, character development, dialog and punctuation).

The "story" (and I use the term loosley) follows an unnamed man and his son down a road. We know nothing about the man or the boy, not even their names. We know that the boy is hungry because he tells the man "I'm hungry" - - we know the man also knows because he tells the boy "I know". And there you have it, the book in a nutshell.

Don't be tempted by the reviews, this book is just bad. Post-Apocalypse books are not new, however since this particular book was marketed to the mainstream reader, it gained notoriety. The genre has so much more to offer, read Swan Song or the Stand or Dies the Fire. Don't read this.