The Road

After reading many different kinds of books, let us now turn to an award winner- Pulitzer Prize winner that is. The Road, written by accomplished writer Cormac McCarthy, is the story of a man and a boy trying to survive a post-apocalyptic world full of danger and killing. Although there is very little knowledge about the events before and even after the book, the author creates a vivid image of life at the present moment for the two protagonists- a man and his son. They travel this post-apocalyptic world just trying to survive and believing in an almost non-existent goal.
I have been meaning to read this book for a while now, but kept making up excuses not to read the book. I was afraid of the depressing nature of the book. Even though the subject is very grave, I did not necessarily feel utterly depressed reading it because the writing eases the reader. The writing is beautiful and almost dreamlike. It is no wonder that this book received such high acclaim. There are no conventional uses of quotation marks or commas. Perhaps McCarthy chose to write in this matter because it makes the reading continuous and the sentences blur together as the man and boy's days just blur together.
I kept waiting for some major event to happen. In my own head, I think I created my own suspense. The author let's you know all the possibilities of the man and boy's life ending, so these ideas ran through my head continuously. However, I realized that the events did not matter because the book is much more about the human survival. The world is just about the man and the boy- a father's love and fight, a boy's dream and feelings.
As with most successful books, this novel has turned into a movie that is set to be released this year, 2009. I imagine that, for entertainment's sake, the movie will have much more suspenseful scenes. I'm not sure if I'm ready to watch a scary movie (in fact, I hate scary movies). However, McCarthy does have some success already with his books turning into box office movies hit- he is also the author of No Country for Old Men.