Oprah's Book Club: The Road
I just got done reading one of Oprah's Book club selection, The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I actually downloaded a free audio book from Netlibrary which I get a free account via the local library network. Pretty amazing how technology works. I got it because I had a 5 hr drive down to Fayetteville this past weekend to visit some old college buddies. The trip went well but that will be a separate post.Now more about the book. It was a very weird yet interesting book. I cannot decide whether I like or dislike it. Very much the same feelings I had when I watched Stranger than Fiction, Running with Scissors and Children of Men.
Here's a synopsis I got from the Oprah book site:
"Set in the smoking ashes of a post-apocalyptic America, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road tells the story of a father-son journey toward the sea and an uncertain salvation. The world they pass through is a ghastly vision of scorched countryside and blasted cities “held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell” [p. 181]. It is a starved world, all plant and animal life dead or dying, some of the few human survivors even eating each other alive.The father and son move through the ruins searching for food and shelter, trying to keep safe from murderous, roving bands. They have only a pistol to defend themselves, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.Awesome in the totality of its vision, The Road is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation."
I think the author did a fantastic job and describing the catastrophic environment that surrounds the characters and also amazing at building up the two main characters, the man and the boy. What I didn't particularly like about this book was the abrupt beginning and ending of the book, taking a strange clip from post-apocalyptic world. As suggested on Oprah's site and wikipedia, this book definitely had a religious undertone to it making it feel like the boy is the messiah. Anyway it was entertaining enough to keep me listening to it to the very end. There are many Study Questions posted on Oprah's site which are quite interesting too.
