The Road

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The Road. I just finished this book last Saturday. Wow!! What a captivating novel about survival in it's purist form. I just found out they are making a movie based on the book. This book was so real when dealing with the mindset of average everyday joes being survivors in a cataclysmic event. An excellent read.
 
Sounds interesting. I will check it out. Thanks for the reccomendation. The book is always better then the movie.
 
I enjoyed "The Road" as well.
If you want to read a lighter version of the end
check out "Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse"
Two extremely different looks at the same scenario.
Doc
 
he also wrote "No Country For Old Men" which was also great. Haven't seen the movie version yet so can't comment on how that went.
 
Cormac McCarthy
his style is unique,

His style is pretentious. A truly great writer could craft as powerful a story using actual English. I really, really dislike the E. E. Cummings approach to writing.

he also wrote "No Country For Old Men" which was also great. Haven't seen the movie version yet so can't comment on how that went.

It's a great movie until just before the end -- and then you wonder what the hell you spent all that time doing, and why you can't get it back.
 
His style is pretentious. A truly great writer could craft as powerful a story using actual English.

Gimme a break. Good god Phil... do you even need to be conservative in the novels you read? Maybe he just writes at a level beyond your grasp? :p

:D

I've read everything that Mccarthy has written and he has become one of my favourite writers. I think his writing style is unique and even necessary in most of his novels... a poetic and austere dichotomy. Once you get your mind around it -- it flows quite well and really adds to the telling of this story especially.

The Road is an outstanding novel, bleak and frightening; deep archetypal images of man's greatest fears -- the collapse of society and the collapse of the social contract -- back to a Hobbesian state of nature -- survival of the fittest and the most vicious. It looks at how and if traditional human relationships can work in this world.

I really recommend the "Border Trilogy" -- All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain -- written in a "classic" yet still stark western romantic style -- horses, cattle, guns, women, Mexico and Texas -- what more could a man want? However he also throws in some deeper more abstract content about the human condition, the nature of evil, the battle between man and nature and man's ever present internal psychic battles.
 
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I will start by saying I loved the book so much I have read it three times. I also find that it does hurt the soul a little to read it. Anyone who previously fantasized about the "perfection" of surviving after SHTF comes to Jesus after reading that. This is not a dig at anyone, just an observation.
 
The story has little or nothing to do with survival, really.

Like other stories by this author, it has to do with worldview, relationships, and personal ideals.

Andy
 
I like McCarthy's earlier novels (Blood Meridian) but I think with this one he was sipping his own bathwater, like all-too-many published authors and national columnists (Tom Friedman, for instance).
 
i remember reading about this book in a few other threads, in the past... it looks pretty good.... i might have to look into it...:thumbup:
 
I really got into The Road, especially thinking about myself and my 2 year old son. Some parts were really moving.

I can see how his writing can be seen as pretentious and I tire at some of the longer, more dense passages of Blood Meridian or The Crossing, but I felt that The Road and No Country didn't have nearly as much to work through. They were much more straightforward novels.
 
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