BOOK REVIEW: The Road

My first RIP V review! YAY

The Road.

Post-apocalyptic.

Pulitzer Prize.

Viggo Mortenson.

Wait. Strike that last one. He's only in the movie.

This was my first foray into the world of Pulitzer Prize-winners, a genre that always brings to mind stuffy men in monocles, smoking pipes and saying things like "Good show!" and "Right-O Old Chap"

I'm really not sure what that says about me.

The Road is about as far from that image as I think it is possible to be. Except maybe Christopher Moore. But I think we all know he's not winning a Pulitzer anytime soon.

Anyway.

The Road.

I had a hard time, at first, deciding whether or not I was enjoying the book. On the one hand, it is dark and depressing and there is so little humor or happiness in it. It's very gray reading, if that makes any sense.

On the other, the love between the father and son, the struggle to continue living and surviving, the pure effort that each day brings, is so incredibly palpable that this book is almost impossible to put down.

As with any post-apocalyptic novel, there is the occasional step into man's inhumanity to man, but it never becomes the whole story. The cannibalism, theft and murder that some of the world has descended into is only ever a step along the journey, the trouble of one day before moving onto the next. I appreciated this in the book. I also appreciated that nothing was solved. This was not a story about fixing a broken world or rebuilding one society from the ashes of another. It was the story of one man wandering the world with one boy, trying not to make a new life, but to survive the old one for as long as they can.

I wouldn't call this "Pleasure Reading", necessarily. I didn't really enjoy it in the traditional way that one enjoys a book, and to say that I enjoyed a book that contains so much darkness and unhappiness would sound almost like sacrilege anyway.

The best I can say about The Road is that, while not really an "enjoyable" book, it is a good book. Maybe even a great one.

Highly recommended as a one-time read.

RIP V Challenge: The Book List

After many recommendations from the wonderful readers in my life, I have chosen the four books I will be reading for the challenge.

1. The Road by Cormac McCarthy

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Recommended by: My SIL, Sara

I'm 95 pages in, and while it is slow going, It's a very good read so far. It took me a little while to get used to the fact that Mr. McCarthy doesn't use quotations and that the Man and the Boy don't have actual names, but I've gotten over it and everything is alright again.
Also, every time I read the author's name, I misread it as Cormac McLaggen, who is a fictional Hogwarts student, not an author. I have read Harry Potter far to many times.
2. The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

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Recommended by: Goodreads

It's about Vampires (sort of), and who doesn't love a good vampire story?

3. Interview with a Vampire by Anne Rice
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Recommended by: My Uncle Lance

His actual recommendation was "Anything by Anne Rice", and this seems to be one of those "read before you die" books.

4. Firestarter by Stephen King

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Recommended by: My mother and sister

I've never read anything by Stephen King, but apparently this particular title is very Koontz-esque, and I do love Dean Koontz.

I have the first one on loan from my SIL, and the other three waiting for me at the library. Should be a good two months.

RIP V Challenge

I'm not sure how I didn't know things like this existed, but they DO!

It's like Christmas in September.

Image Source and Also to figure out what I'm talking about

By "things like this", I mean book challenges. I like nothing better than to be given guidelines. I love them. Put me in a library and say "pick anything you want", and I crumble into an incoherent wreck, rocking in the corner. Say "find something that means guidelines x, y and z", and I'm a kid on a scavenger hunt.

It's totally healthy and well-adjusted of me, I'm sure.

I don't normally read scary books (unless you count Harry Potter as scary, which I do which no self-respecting adult does), but I am at the end of my to-be-read shelf, and I need inspiration. This challenge seems like just the thing. Plus, it forces me to read outside my quite narrow book-comfort zone. I'm not really sure where to begin. It feels like cheating to start with something like Twilight, which, while about vampires, is about sparkly vampires, which negates the whole "scary" thing a bit. I do like Sherlock Holmes quite a bit, and that seems like a relatively calm entrance into the world of spooky/scary/creepy stories. I must let myself in gently.

I'll try very very hard to remember to review the books as I read them. This isn't strictly a "book blog", but who am I kidding? I rarely talk about, you know, my life on here. Mostly I just talk to you about books I read, movies I watch and my feet swelling for no apparent reason.

The point is, I'm enabling my terrible habit of writing about books rather than about me. This is a terrible thing for me to do, as no one could ever have enough me.

I'm still going to do it. Scary books! Scary book reviews! Book Challenge!

Huzzah!