The Road is a truly disturbing book; it is absorbing, mystifying and completely harrowing. Simply because it shows us how man could act given the right circumstances; it’s a terrifying concept because it could also be a true one.It isn’t a book that gives you any answers, you have to put the pieces together and presume. For whatever reason, be it nuclear war or environmental collapse, the world has gone to hell. It is a wasteland of perpetual greyness and ash. Very little grows anymore, and th...

The view that there are two independent, primal forces in the universe, one good and one evil, is called dualism. According to dualism, the good God does the best he can to promote good and combat evil but he can only do so much since evil is a powerful counterforce in its own right. The ancient Gnostics were dualist with their scriptures emphasizing the mythic rather than the historic and positing our evil world of matter created not by an all-powerful God but by a flawed deity called the Demiu...

(A-) 84% | Very Good
Notes: Dreamlike and deeply moving, it's thin on plot, with dialogue that's often genius, but also inauthentic and repetitive.

Every year on Father’s Day I put this book up as a staff recommendation with the blurb “A story of a father and son doing some camping.
Also cannibals.”
Carry the fire.

How to Write Like Cormac McCarthy1. Make sure the first sentence contains a verb.2. But neither the second.3. Nor the third.4. Repeat until finished. 5. Or sooner deterred.We'll Become Well EventuallyThe Boy: Papa?Papa: Yes?The Boy: What's this?Papa: It's an apostrophe.The Boy: What does it do?Papa: It takes two words and turns them into a contraction.The Boy: Is that good?Papa: Years ago people used to think it was good.The Boy: What about now?Papa: Not many people use them now.The Boy: Does th...

This wasn't nearly as funny as everybody says it is.

He palmed the spartan book with black cover and set out in the gray morning. Grayness, ashen. Ashen in face. Ashen in the sky.He set out for the road, the book in hand. Bleakness, grayness. Nothing but gray, always.He was tired and hungry. Coughing. The coughing had gotten worse. He felt like he might die. But he couldn't die. Not yet.The boy depended on him.He walked down the road, awaiting the creaking bus. It trundled from somewhere, through the gray fog. The ashen gray fog.He stepped aboard,...

So I generally don't hate books - Recently when joining a face2face club they asked which book I disliked the most - and had no answer. Well I want to thank Cormac McCarthy for giving me something to be able to put there.Having heard the buzz about this book and having seen the plethora of positive reviews, I felt compelled to write my own if only to be that voice of reason in a wilderness of pretentious insanity. Cormac’s McCarthy’s The Road, I can honestly say, is the worst book I have ever re...

The Road is unsteady and repetitive--now aping Melville, now Hemingway--but it is less a seamless blend than a reanimated corpse: sewn together from dead parts into a lumbering, incongruous whole, then jolted to ignoble half-life by McCarthy’s grand reputation with Hollywood Filmmakers and incestuous award committees.In '96, NYU Professor Alan Sokal submitted a paper for publication to several scientific journals. He made it so complex and full of jargon the average person wouldn't be able to ma...

I really feel compelled to write up a review of McCarthy's The Road as this book really worked for me (for those of you who haven't read it, there are no real spoilers below, only random quotes and thematic commentary). I read it last night in one sitting. Hours of almost nonstop reading. I found it to be an excellent book on so many levels that I am at a loss as to where to begin. It was at once gripping, terrifying, utterly heart-wrenching, and completely beautiful. I have read most of McCarth...