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Loading... The Roadby Cormac McCarthy
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. After 3 false starts with this book, I finally managed to finish it. It took me a while to get over McCarthy's writing style, and I'm still not a fan of it. I generally like dystopian fiction, and this was okay as far as that goes, but it certainly isn't the best dystopian novel ever written. At times, I found myself counting backwards from the last page to see how many pages I had left to read, but in the end, the book turned out to be just interesting enough to finish. The ending, however, was slightly weak, in my opinion. I hesitated to give it 3 stars, but I went ahead and did it since I did enjoy the book at times. This is going to be a tiny review. If you are looking for a happy go lucky book, this ain't it. I really enjoyed it, but it is dark, dank, and dreary. I listened to it in a few days, which for an audiobook is amazing for me. It had me hooked from the get go. It's just so sad. I had to fight back tears in some spots. I will say one thing, I really liked is they didn't give the characters names. It was just "the boy" and "Papa". I don't know why but this fit the book very well. The lengths that the father went to so he could protect his son were heartwarming and something that stayed with me during and after finishing the book. I'm putting a warning on this because there are few disturbing scenes in the book and I can honestly say a couple of them will stick with me for a long time to come. The scenes aren't long in length but they pack a punch. If there is a better living writer than Cormac McCarthy I don't know who it would be. I know, I know, his books focus on men but just when did that become a bad thing? The Road is about a father and son, and it's a beautiful story. The setting is bleak, or stark, or think of your own depressing word here; but all the grim events only serve to set off the wonder and strength of the relationship and the humanity it illuminates. In contrast to the author's other books like All the Pretty Horses that rely on realistic detail to tell the story and draw the reader in to the unfamiliar word inhabited by the characters, The Road is just the opposite; there is little detail, nothing is explained but the reader is drawn in no less skillfully. If the book doesn't bring a tear to the eye, this reviewer is befuddled. McCarthy has a classic on his hands. This book was utterly amazing. Some of these images he created will stay with me for a really long time. Love, loss, courage, the will to survive, and simple pain. It completely blew me away.
“The Road” is a dynamic tale, offered in the often exalted prose that is McCarthy’s signature, but this time in restrained doses — short, vivid sentences, episodes only a few paragraphs or a few lines long, which is yet another departure for him. Post-apocalyptic fiction isn't automatically better when written by Cormac McCarthy, but he does have a way of investing genre clichés with fine gray tones and morose poetry. “The Road” offers nothing in the way of escape or comfort. But its fearless wisdom is more indelible than reassurance could ever be. Through his scaled-down view of a post-apocalypse American east, McCarthy has discovered a rich, engrossing landscape that is distinctly his own. It’s a horrible pleasure to watch the father and his son make their way through it, even as one remains unsure whether it would be more humane to hope for their survival or hope for their gentle death.
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I think the quality of the writing is very good, but it's the sort of book where I can have read a page and have no idea what happened because I haven't taken it in, and I think part of the reason for that is that the story is all fixed around these two characters and not a great deal happening really.
I'm looking forward to seeing the film as I think it will transfer to screen really well. (