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...

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,...

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

I'm a terrible person because I didn't really like "The Road" and I'm not sure how I feel about Cormac McCarthy. Honestly, I think there's something wrong with me. I just finished reading "The Road" today - it only took a couple of hours to get through, because it's not that long a book, and I think it was a good way to read it because I felt really immersed in the story, which is told like one long run-on nightmare of poetic import. The characters don't get quotation marks when they speak, and

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

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...

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 dualists 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 Demi...

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...

A good friend gave this to me to read. I told him I already had an audiobook working and he said, "you'll want to read this one". I could barely put it down. Mesmerizing. McCarthy's prose is simple, fable like, yet also lyrical, like a minamalistic poet. The portrait he has painted is dark and foreboding, difficult and painful, yet he carries "the fire" throughout, a spark of hope and love that must be his central message to the reader. Having read the book, not sure if I want to see the film, i...

Ladies and gentlemen of Goodreads, I present to you my first five star review of 2018- The Road by Cormac McCarthy. And, ladies and gentlemen of Goodreads, here is the crazy thing. This is my THIRD time reading the book! My THIRD time! And y’all wanna know how many stars I rated this book last time? TWO! TWO WHOLE STARS! I didn’t even write a review. I just gave it two stars and moved on with my life. And now here I am with a five star review, and, folks, I can’t even explain what’s happened to

This book is shocking, loving, groundbreakingly impressive, beautifully written. I read through it without breathing, I mean I just had to know what was coming on the next page, and cried several times. Without a doubt one of the best books, if not the best, I read, ever...

One of my favourite of all time.Loved everything. Terrifying.

I just read some guy's review of The Road that contained the following:"In the three hours that I read this book I found myself crying, laughing, shouting, and most of the time my lip was trembling. ... As soon as I finished it, I sat there feeling numb, but not in a bad way, actually sort of like I was high."Wow, dude. I mean, really? Your lip was trembling? And you felt high? And your lip was trembling? Pherphuxake, what do you even say to someone like that?------------------------------------...

Two lonely figures appear out in the sparse, dark landscape walking by in the gloom going forward to oblivion probably, never resting until they find the nebulous nirvana; which may not be. A man and his boy both remain nameless throughout the book, hungry, tired dispirited wearing rags living if this is the proper word trying to survive a world changed forever ... a bleak atmosphere where the strong kill the weak looking for any food...animal, vegetable or human, nothing is more paramount than

This is one of the saddest books about a father and child that I have ever read in my life . . yet. There were a couple of happy times. Not so much though =( Mel ♥

I have nightmares similar to what Cormac McCarthy depicted in his book.I’m with my family. Sometimes, it’s just my son and I. The dystopia might not be the nuclear winter portrayed here, but it has the same type of vibe. Rampant fear and chaos, breakdown of society, everyone pitted against everyone else and my only thought is to somehow hold my family together and protect them.Or we’re traveling or holed up somewhere and everything is quiet and we’re suddenly overrun.Fear is the core. Fear is t

A man and his young son are traveling along a highway, hoping to get far enough south to avoid the onslaught of winter. It is a post apocalyptic landscape, heavy with ash, in which you can hear the absence of birds chirping or bugs buzzing. The language is remarkable. I was reminded of Thomas Hardy for beauty of language, but it is a different sort of beauty. McCarthy uses short declaratives, as if even language was short of breath in the devastation, and terrorizes generations of elementary sch...

Phew. This is a brilliant, bleak, beautiful book, but an emotionally harrowing one, albeit with uplifting aspects (they always cling to a sliver of hope, however tenuous).PLOTThere isn't much. But that's fine by me. In the near future, a man and his son traipse south, across a cold, barren, ash-ridden and abandoned land, pushing all their worldly goods in a wonky shopping trolley. They scavenge to survive and are ever-fearful of attack, especially as some of the few survivors have resorted to ca...

“Just beyond the high gap in the mountains they stood and looked out over the great gulf to the south where the country as far as they could see was burned away, the blackened shapes of rock standing out of the shoals of ash and billows of ash rising up and blowing downcountry through the waste. The track of the dull sun moving unseen beyond the murk.”Written with such sublime prose, The Road is completely different from anything I have read before. It is tragic yet somehow simple and lovely. Th...

Apocalyptic The Road tells the story of a father and son warily travelling across post-apocalyptic America, hoping to reach a place of sanctuary. The atmosphere drapes the reader in a throbbing dread for the character's lives and the acute fear of a father to keep his son safe. In a very unique and unexpected way, Cormac McCarthy creates a mesmeric story out of pure gloom and hopelessness. Everything is stripped away including the man and the boy’s names. The writing style is concise and the di

The main point I want to deal with is how I managed to walk away from this book with a trenchant sense of gratitude at the forefront of my mind. I certainly won’t mislead and paint this story as one that directly radiates things to be happy about, but I do think it does so indirectly (and the term "happy" is far too facile for my purposes here). This is an extremely dark tale of a world passed through a proverbial dissolvent. A world stripped of its major ecological systems. Small pockets of hom...

Five Stars For Brilliant Story Telling: It really doesn’t get any better than this. The story is a journey, an epic journey, a hero’s journey. The prose is sparse and real in its immediacy. We not only read it but feel it, smell it, taste it. That is a rare treat for any reader.Five Stars For Best Father and Son Relationship: The father and his son in this book have such a strong bond, it is both heart wrenching and inspiring to share it. On their long journey, they teach each other, mostly by...

I’m trying to find solace in the fact that I’m probably not the only one to be humiliatingly hoodwinked into taking the time to read Cormac McCarthy’s much-celebrated yawn-fest “The Road”, although this hardly makes this bamboozling something to boast about. In spite of the fact approximately three-fourths of the world seemed to readily embrace this as worthy fare, I managed to keep my distance for some time, mainly through ignorance of the general plot of the book and my usual stubborn reluctan...

“What would you do if I died?If you died I would want to die too.So you could be with me?Yes. So I could be with you.Okay.” --McCarthy4/6/18 Re-reading this for my spring 2o18 Climate Change class, and even knowing how it ends, I am wrecked, just devastated by this book, so horrific and so beautiful and moving. Sobbing as I do at the most intimate of losses, but feeling the intensity of any great passionate beauty, too. The beauty of a great book that helps you see what matters. 9/1/14 Original

The road is a promise. A father and a son, survivors of an anonymous apocalypse, hold on to that promise. Cormac McCarthy follows them closely on their march through barren wastelands, dead forests and decaying towns. The footsteps they leave in the ubiquitous dust are swept away by the cold ashen breath of the grey earth. Whatever gets left behind ceases to exist. The promise is brittle. Hold on to it too tightly, dream of it too violently, and both the promise and the road will turn to dust, l...

Excuse me please while I cover my face with my hands and quietly sob.In a scorched and dangerous post-apocalyptic America, an unnamed father and son scavenge for food, look for shelter and try to avoid bandits and people who’ve resorted to cannibalism. The two, pushing along their rusty cart, travel the road simply because they must. The alternative is death.I admire the fact that there’s no explanation about how the end of the world happened and why certain people survived. There are a couple o...

This novel is both dismal and poignant. The tale is that of a man and his son, trying to survive on a devastated (possibly post-nuclear) land, covered in ashes. They trudge through on a deserted road that doesn't seem to lead anywhere. They are starving for the most part. From time to time they either find food, or they come up with a group of man-eating panhandlers.Not much of a plot to speak of in this book, and all this seems to be a pointless and painful attempt at surviving in a world that