2007: #89 – The Road (Cormac McCarthy)

Book #89 was The Road by Cormac McCarthy. The back of the book reads:

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food-—and each other.

The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, “each the other’s world entire,” are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it 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 didn’t think I was going to like this, but once I got used to McCarthy’s style of prose I was hopelessly hooked. You find yourself wondering if you should feel worse for the man who knows what he’s lost, or the boy who will never know what could have been. You never find out quite what has caused the world to be this way. And the story ends in a way I never expected.

Page count: 304 | Approximate word count: 95,449

2006 – Dangerous Tides (Christine Feehan)