Summer Books #1: The Road
May 19th, 2007
Back in the halcyon days of my youth, I would love participating in the Moraga Library’s summer reading program. Read fifteen books over the course of summer, get a bunch of stamps on a little map they give out, and get a coupon to Round Table Pizza. Brilliant. It mixed my two favorite hobbies, reading and eating.
Of course, when I asked the librarian at the Boston Public Library if I could get a stamp on my reading map last week, she had me thrown out of the building. So I just have to post about the books on my blog instead, and buy myself a pizza in August.
I’ll admit, the first thing I did after buying Cormack McCarthy’s The Road was to scratch the Oprah’s Book Club sticker off of the cover. I mean, can you blame me? I’ve got an image to uphold here.
The Road tells the tale of a man and his son struggling to survive in a lonely post-apocalyptic world. Desolation, hunger, and the occasional unspeakable horror is all they face, while continually trying to move towards the vague and imagined salvation of “the coast.”
McCarthy’s quick, spare prose is tense and gripping, and perfectly evokes the sense of hardy determinism and despair that his characters are going through. And while reading it, you’ll go through it too - as they put one foot in front of another, you’ll turn page after page.
I bet most people wonder about as they finish the novel is what they would do in a situation like this. All I could think about, however, is: what would Oprah do? If the bombs dropped, and civilization was destroyed, what would Oprah do? My guess is first, burn all of her Book Club selections for warmth, and second, eat Steadman, but that’s purely conjecture.
The Road: ****/5
