I’ve somehow managed to finish reading my third book out of college, The Road. And it didn’t take me months to finish, unlike with Underworld.
I knew going in that this was a book about a man and his son trying to survive in some post-apocalyptic world. I usually wouldn’t be attracted to a book with such a grim plot description, but I was strangely intrigued by all the praise it got.
I was amazed at how well-written it was. Maybe I’m just unaccustomed to reading, but the language McCarthy used was so descriptive, so evocative. The bond between the man and the boy was touching. During their harrowing journey to the coast, despite some really bleak moments when it seems like nothing is going right, they still keep that strong love for each other, and that was just really heartwarming for me. I kept wanting to know what happens to them, hoping page after page that they would eventually make it somehow.
But this book does have a lot of strange vocabulary, some words that I even had to do a Google search for because I couldn’t find them in my dictionary app. I suppose that’s just Cormac McCarthy’s style, but still, I found it distracting when I had to stop reading just to look up something.
I’ve heard from a lot of people that they found this book depressing. In some weird way, I found the fact that the man and the boy get through as much as they can in such conditions strangely uplifting. I suppose that I was concentrating more on how they carried each other through such terrible times, rather than the terribleness itself. Probably because I didn’t want to get depressed about it.