All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain. The story confronts us with characters forced moment by moment to recognize what matters. Neither color nor sunshine decks this landscape. Along with the constant threat, McCarthy’s spare prose builds a world in which trinkets and distractions have been stripped away.

The man and son on the road live every day knowing that someone is there to shoot them, just around the bend, in the weeds across the ditch, or coming up behind them. These words, near the end of Flanner O’Connor’s “ A Good Man Is Hard to Find ,” bounced around in my head as I made my way through Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road. it's timeless, brilliant, scary, and breathtaking.“She would of been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” I think this book is destined to be a classic. It's a book you read because it is so powerful and so moving and because it encapsulates what it means to be alive.

I know some folks didn't like it, but it really isn't a book you read to like. So please, if you haven't read it, give it a shot. It is very hard to describe the details in this book that impacted me so strongly without spoiling the story. and I think it would have been even bigger had I not been putting the book down and then picking it up. It brings you so forcefully into another world that it is hard to exit and re-enter it. I didn't have the time to do that, but I think it can be read in 3 hours (probably 2 hours by folks who read faster than I do), and once you get into it, you'll feel reluctant to put it down. If you can possibly read this book in one sitting, I'd highly recommend it. It's a story of survival, but it is also so much more than that. As they try to make their way to someplace, anyplace more hospitable, we can feel every ounce of their pain and desperation. There's really nothing to live for, yet their will and drive to survive continues. The story is very simple about a man and his son trying to make their way in an extremely inhospitable post- apocalyptic world. The way the words are put together reflect the story itself.Īt its heart, this book is about the love between a father and son as well as an insightful treatise on the cynicism of adults versus the innocence of children. The writing is very spare, but it so fits the book.

simple, bare, stark, bleak, cold, rugged, and yet somehow still exquisite. This book is beautiful in the same way the Alaskan landscape is beautiful. Let's just start off by saying that books don't make me cry.

The road cormac mccarthy amazon