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Loading... The Road (Oprah's Book Club)by Cormac McCarthy
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won't like
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. When I first started reading the The Road I had a feeling that I would not like it. It started out pretty slow and it took me awhile to get use to the format. I also had trouble with the fact that the two main characters were not given names. But in the end the book was good. It is really hard to explain this book. McCarthy takes the reader on a post-apoticapic journey where a father and his son (who seems to be pretty young between 8 or 10) are trying to travel to the south to escape the winter. They have to be careful because not everyone is peace loving and there is no food or clean water anywhere. When I got into the story, the fact that McCarthy never gave the characters name made the book more personal. I was able to pictures the main characters in my mind and I started to relate to them. The relationship that the father and son shared was special and you could see the depth of love that the father felt. Most books are written in chapter format. But McCarthy diverges from this style. Instead it is paragraph form. Each paragraph is a different event or point. I have never come across this style this before. McCarthy worked the style very well. In a post-apocalyptic America, a man and his young son try to make the journey south, where they hope to find a life where they can do more than just survive. At the moment, they are just about managing to stay alive in a barren world where houses and stores have been plundered and ruined, and every stranger they encounter is a very real threat. This is an amazing book. The relationship between the man and the boy - who remain unnamed throughout the novel - is totally believeable. They are both all that the other has, and the man will do anything to protect his son, while the son puts all his faith and trust into his father. The pair show the lengths that people will go to to survive, while still trying to hold onto their humanity; they also show the reserves of strength and thought that people find in such situations, where they are having to consider their every action and deed. The bare landscape is also portrayed magnificently, and is frighteningly imaginable. The language is very clean, with no unnecessary words; the barren-ness of the prose reflects the barren-ness of the country. I was drawn into this book from the very first pages, and didn't want to put it down. I was anxious to get to the end to find out what would be the fate of these two characters, but when I finished it, I wished that there was still more to read. A very thought provoking novel that will stay with me for a long time - highly recommended. A fine novel, worthy of the Pullitzer prize it won. Most has been said already in the reviews below. However, I definitely disagree with those saying this book leaves "no hope". If you pay some attention to what happens during the story, you'll see the book shows as much hope as life itself. Highly recommended. An interesting book. I found it to be virtually devoid of hope. The post-apocalypse distopia has been done better, Oryx and Crake is one example. But none-the-less a compelling and hard to put down book. 0.416 seconds to build listing
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I was annoyed with the conversations the father and son had, having children myself I cannot imagine being able to answer a question with a single statement and say Okay? Okay. and be done with it. I believe the sparseness of the conversations lead to the bleakness of the novel, but it just wasn't for me.
I didn't have an issue with the punctuation, but I did from time to time have to re-read some of the conversations so I could follow who was saying what.
It was a quick read and I did enjoy the description of the world around the characters, it did promote a gray and leak world in which they were trying to survive. (