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The Road

Cormac McCarthy

Start date: August 1, 2018

Finish date: August 31, 2018

Discussion: 2018 RT Tournament of Books

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What Members Thought

Jul 05, 2011 Christopher rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 21st-century, favorites, future-classics, american, fiction, nameless-characters, apocalypse, pulitzer-prize

UPDATE 11/16/19:
Read #4, this time on audiobook. Finished it while driving on the expressway at 75 mph, crying and snotting all over myself. This book just keeps getting more potent with age.

ORIGINAL REVIEW 8/12/18:
I've now read this three times, but this last one was a completely different experience for me. I now have a four year old son, and this book feels utterly, horrifyingly real to me.

Throughout a normal day, I have terrible flashes of my son terrified and alone. Did I accidentally forge ...more

10 likes · Like · see review

Apr 21, 2009 El rated it really liked it

Shelves: 21st-centurylit, society-went-boom, peer-pressure

Back-to-back post-apocalyptic literature!

In this more contemporary book the unnamed father and son are on a journey to the coast, without any real plan for what is at the end of their journey. The destruction of civilization is also unnamed, lending a sort of eerie tone to the entire story - what exactly happened? It's the unknown that makes one uncomfortable, and there is plenty of that throughout this story. The man and his son encounter very little on their journey with the occasional interac Back-to-back post-apocalyptic literature!

In this more contemporary book the unnamed father and son are on a journey to the coast, without any real plan for what is at the end of their journey. The destruction of civilization is also unnamed, lending a sort of eerie tone to the entire story - what exactly happened? It's the unknown that makes one uncomfortable, and there is plenty of that throughout this story. The man and his son encounter very little on their journey with the occasional interaction with other survivors, store rooms, etc. I've read many complaints about the tedium of the text, but clearly it was intentional - imagine following a road to possible salvation (though unlikely), with only your father or your son to trust or talk to, with no other living species, no sunlight, no plant life, no idea where the next meal or fresh drink of water might be... my imagination creates a rather tedious landscape also.

The barrenness of McCarthy's post-apocalyptic world is pretty staggering. There is a lot of darkness, from the cover of the book to the description of their environment to their clouded hopes. They live in constant fear of a band of cannibals, referred to for the boy's sake as "the bad guys". The father and his son, of course, are "the good guys". There is no way of knowing who is "bad" and who is "good" as waiting to find out would be exceptionally dangerous.

In addition to the sparsity of the setting, McCarthy's text is rather exiguous as well. There are no quotation marks indicating dialogue between the characters - something I've whined about in regards to other books I've read and blamed on Joyce, blah blah blah. But here it clearly served a purpose - what better way to reflect the desolateness of a post-apocalyptic environment than to remove the personable quotation marks? Also of note are the contractions, most of which go without the apostrophe at the end - ie, "wouldnt", "shouldnt", etc. This feels to me like an extension of the lack of quotation marks around dialogue - without them there is a stream-of-consciousness effect, a sort of internal monologue, again illustrating a tedium of their lives spanning years of this ongoing journey to the coast.

I can't (cant?) say this was as wonderful as A Canticle for Leibowitz, but then I shouldn't (shouldnt?) compare the two - they are obviously on different planes, telling different versions of a similar-but-not-the-same story. Despite Oprah's sticker and all the hoopla surrounding the book, I'm glad I chose to read it on my own. It's a fast read (I read a good chunk of it during my lunch hour yesterday) - there are no chapter breaks but the story is told in brief paragraphs with many easy pausing points to avoid getting lost when having to put it down for any reason.

I have also heard complaints about this book by people who chose to listen to the text on audio. To that I can only say that DUH, of COURSE they're going to be disappointed or not understand what's going on. Part of the experience of reading this book is actually reading this book. I can't imagine how the narrative would be in audio, how the dialogue would run. There is no way to fully enter the story and imagine the landscape by merely listening to someone read the words. Again, McCarthy chose to tell his story in a somewhat visual manner by eliminating punctuation, giving the book an additional disconcerting feeling. That is something that can not be translated to audio.

So put down your Ipod or whatever device you're using, pick up the actual book, and give yourself some time to read it in the way it was most likely meant to be read. The story is not quite as hopeless in the end as one might imagine. But then many stories aren't really. ...more

7 likes · Like · see review

Oct 22, 2008 Sarah rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 5-stars, read-in-2008, apocalypse-dystopia, recommended-novels, tearjerky, pulitzer

I thought this was great. The plot is ridiculously simple and should be monotonous, but instead is enthralling. It's like a fantasy everyone has had, and McCarthy drags you along to live it out. I cried all over my shirt. ...more

5 likes · Like · see review

May 17, 2007 Rachel rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 1001-books-to-read-before-you-die, fiction

I'd always avoided this author, because I don't like westerns or anything describing horses, but since I knew he was supposed to be a great writer, I figured this would be the one to read by him. I liked it a lot, but wasn't sure where all the hype came from. I do think I will check out other titles by him though. ...more

3 likes · Like · see review

Nov 07, 2014 Dawn rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: audiobook, literary-fiction, science-fiction

I liked it but didn't love it. I'm not sure I have ever read a book so bleak and depressing. He did a fantastic job of painting an apocalyptic world.
The constant repetition of three words/phrases (I'm sorry/Okay/I don't know) really annoyed me by the second half of the book though. ...more

2 likes · Like · see review

Sep 09, 2015 Irene rated it liked it

A man and his young son travel through a desolate, violent post-apocalyptic world. The reader is never told the cause of the decimation, but I was given the impression of a catastrophic explosion, most likely that of an enormous thesaurus factory. Read aloud, the phrasing had the cadence of poetry which vividly evoked the desolation. But, that poetic style became a window between me and the world of the story, enhancing my vision, but preventing me from entering. I regret this distance because t ...more

1 like · Like · see review

Sep 18, 2010 Alasse rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 1001-books, dystopic-or-apocalyptic, effing-disturbing

Done. Now I need a hug.

2 likes · Like · see review

Feb 13, 2009 Meghan rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: sci-fi, own, book-club, american, classics, modern-classics, movie, sfbc, kindle

This is what hell is. I've read Dante's Inferno and Sarte's No Exit but this is what I think hell would be. An endless walking in fear and desperation with oases of hope only to take you just far enough before you're overcome by the pointlessness of it all with the knowledge that you are too weak to end it yourself.

From the man who wrote All the Pretty Horses this is a bleak, bleak tale of humanity's last moments. I read this story with my heart clenched out of fear for our narrator and his smal ...more

1 like · Like · see review

Dec 24, 2007 Sera rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: literary-fiction

This book is about a man and his young boy trying to survive in a post-apocolyptic world. It's a tough read, albeit a quick one, because most of the story is very bleak. I'm glad that I read it, but I find it difficult to recommend to others for myriad reasons. ...more

1 like · Like · see review

Jan 06, 2008 Rosana rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2007

I read this book a few months ago, but it has not yet got out of my mind. It is an unsettling book to say the least. Like all great literature, it is not an easy book to read, not because the writing is difficult (the writing is brilliant!) but because it plays all our emotional buttons. An environmental catastrophe on Earth and its aftermath becomes the foreground were a father's attempt to retain his own and his son's humanity weighs against the pure instinct of survival. This is not a book fo ...more

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Jan 24, 2012 Heather(Gibby) rated it really liked it

I have read a fair bit of dystopia, and I feel this is one of the better ones. Really gripping, you can really see and feel through the father and son characters. A few scenes were cringe worthy gruesome, but I felt it was not gratuitously used throughout the book.

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