I don’t like books that don’t use quotation marks. It makes me feel a little crazy, like there are no boundaries marking what is what.
I mentioned this in a previous post. A friend from college responded and asked, “Does this mean that you don’t read Cormac McCarthy?”
I try to be open-minded and so I agreed to read at least 50 pages of whichever Cormac McCarthy book my friend recommended. He directed me to The Road, and so I checked it out from the library.
I noticed resistance in reading it, but whenever I did pick it up, I would get hooked and read much more than I was intending to.
This is a bleak book with glimmers of hope. I can’t say that I loved it, but I can appreciate the work.
I might even be open to reading more by the same author.
2 comments:
The best--and most memorable--part was when he drank the coke. I think No Country For Old Men is better. I have it if you would like to borrow it.
I have fallen in love with McCarthy's work. The Road is my favorite. His prose is some of my favorite. I love his quiet, simple sentences, which accentuates the power of each delicately-chosen word.
I love the novel for all sorts of reasons, but I have to admit that it is seared into my memory for what was happening in my life when I firs read The Road. I picked it up just a few months after my father died. I knew nothing of the book going in and the father-son connection drove me to grateful tears several times.
As a warning, The Road might be his most hopeful book. The others I have read are even bleaker -- especially Blood Meridian, which the literati crowd seems to think is his masterpiece.
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