Friday, June 13, 2008

The Road

I just finished reading The Road yesterday. It's a Pulitzer prize winner by Cormac McCarthy. Pretty powerful stuff, it's about a man and his son wandering the burnt out ashes of a nuclear war ravaged earth. Of the two visions of a post apocalyptic world, I prefer the one with crazy psychic mutants over the one with endless winter and people slowly dying of radiation poisoning. But as a depiction of the more likely scenario, this book is tops.

Besides being a moving read, this book also conveys the brutality and just wrongness of a world with no order. Everyone but the main character eats people, that's about the only food source. If you meet someone, 90% chance they want to kill, rob, and eat you. It's set like ten years after the fall of civilization, so there is just about nothing left to scavenge. Shoes are as rare as ammunition and guns. A world full of barefoot bearded killers wielding lead pipes.

3 comments:

Infamous Jum said...

Is this a book you own, a book that could be lent to people you know? No reason, just curious. By the way, I read Almeric this week; good stuff, I'd be interested to chat about that sometime.

skeleri said...

Almeric was my favorite of the planet stories, by far. The Road was acquired from the local library, you have a card? Just found out they are making a movie out of it, starring Vigo Mortensen. No joke.

Infamous Jum said...

Crazy! Yeah, I had a card, years ago. Then I moved out of town for a while, and I used it to pick an exploded rotten apple off of my windshield. Don't ask me where the apple came from or why I chose my card, cause I really don't know.