Book 4/60: The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Okay.

So the recommender for this book tells me it's supposed to be one of the most depressing things ever written.

Huzzah! It'll feel like I'm reading academically again! ;-)

The Road is the story of a father and his young son (Six? Seven? I don't know yet) traveling along, appropriately enough, a road, trying to stay alive in a world that is dead. No signs of life anywhere. Plant life all dead, cities full of rotting human corpses, no bugs, no animals. Dead. Perpetual gray in the sky. And winter is coming.

The Road is another Oprah book club selection, and Entertainment Weekly named it THE best book of the past 25 years. Oh yeah, it also won the 2007 Pulitzer for Literature. Viggo Mortensen is starring in the movie, supposedly out this October.

As for McCarthy himself, he's in his third marriage (the first two he divorced) and was described as a "gregarious loner" by the New York Times in a rare interview. He doesn't appear to like writers, and he doesn't think stories that do not deal with life and death directly should be considered literature. His last novel before The Road was something called No Country for Old Men; I wonder if that'll ever catch on.

All righty. Award-winning secluded writer who dislikes writers and has trouble with relationships writes depressing story about the end of the world. Time to dig in!

Stats:
287 pages
Published by Vintage International, a division of Random House
Copyright 2006
Awards: 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
2006 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction