The Road (Oprah's Book Club)

I won't say much about this book that hasn't already been said by others. This was a stunningly dark and beautifully written book. It reads like poetry.
The back drop of the story takes place sometime in a nuclear winter with a father and son trying to survive. There's no vegetation, the oceans are dead, no animals live other than a few scattered human survivors, and the sun is locked behind a permanent haze of ash clogged clouds.
This book touches upon a parents darkest fears. It's a book of nightmares that all parents have shared at some point. To provide love, shelter, food and an education can be scary enough in our world but to do all these things in such a bleak and suffocating world seems impossible. Some scenes were straight out of my own personal nightmares and made them all the more terrifying.
I was emotionally moved many times throughout this story and had to put the book down to compose myself. Despite pacing myself, I devoured this reading in two days. This one will haunt me for sometime while at the same time remind me how wonderfully powerful a parent's love is.
If you have children, read only when your kids are close by so you can reassure yourself now and then.
Here's one for the good guys who carry the torch. Enjoy.

The way Mccarthy writes this was a bit hard to digest at frist, but after a few pages, it drew me in. Worth the read, highly reccomended.

The sparse prose pulls you in to the depth of man's willingness to survive and push on beyond all point of hope or reason. A dark gem of a novel that pulls away all of the conventional formulas for post-apocalyptic novel and leaves you with the core of humanity struggling to stay alive. Harrowing.

If you're looking for a good post apocalyptic end of the world story, you'd probably be much better off with On The Beach, Alas Babylon, or even Lucifer's Hammer. While this book does take place after an apparent nuclear war, it's much more of a character study of a man in truly impossible circumstances trying desperately to keep his son alive. In that it succeeds very well and as a father myself, I could really feel what the man's going through.

However, and the reason this book doesn't get more stars from me, is that the book becomes repetitive, they're cold, they're starving, they're on the verge of death, the find food just in time, they move on, repeat. We never learn where they're trying to go (other than south but from some reason they also go to the ocean). We never learn there names or how they got to this point beyond the vaguest clues. And the somewhat upbeat ending seems very convenient and out of the blue given what we've already seen.

Personally, I also found some of the literary style annoying such as the lack of quotation marks when people are speaking or some of the made up words (glassing instead of looking with binoculars).

Okay, so brutally wonderful is a weird description. Sorry. It's hard to describe this book. Love. If you're a parent, you'll get it. And cry. If not, you may or may not like the book. McCarthy's style is original, blunt, and until you get into the rhythm of the book, can be confusing (no punctuation for dialogue). This one reads as well as "No Country", but is a more human story in an inhuman post apocalyptic world. I loved it. It touched me, scared me, and broke my heart.