Books: The Road

The Road by Cormac McCarthy.
"In his new novel, McCarthy exchanges the bleak Western setting of previous works for an even bleaker post-apocalyptic one. As usual, lawless space engenders violence, but here a nuclear holocaust has reduced everything to ash, mummifying all but a few unlucky souls, who must kill or be killed (and eaten). The main characters are a father and his son, who was born a few nights after the bombs fell. "We're still the good guys," the man repeatedly assures the boy as they scavenge their way south for the winter, trying to avoid "bad guy" survival techniques. Even by McCarthy's standards, the horrors here—an infant "headless and gutted and blackening on the spit"—are extreme, and, deprived of historical context, his brutality can seem willful. But McCarthy's prose retains its ability to seduce—the deathscape is "like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world"—and there are nods to the gentler aspects of the human spirit." The New Yorker, taken from Amazon.com

This is a much faster read than I thought it would be. Very interesting, sad & touching. It really stays with you & I already know that I'll want to read it again. My only problem with it was that it left so many unanswered questions but perhaps that was the point. Definitely a book you'll want to discuss after you're done with it