Review Three

The Road, Cormac McCarthy

4.5 Stars

I read this book before I'd bought furniture for my apartment. So I mostly read it while lying on a mattress on the floor in an otherwise bare room. I think the setting helped me identify with the protagonists ("the man" and "the boy") who spend much of the book squatting in the abandoned houses of the post-apocalypse. My defining memory of reading The Road is of when pure dread caused me to involuntarily put it down. I don't recall a book ever causing me to do that before.

It's a cliche, but this is a book that stays with you. I think for months afterward I was returned to its world every time I saw a hobo pushing a shopping trolley down a San Francisco sidewalk (which is every few minutes in this town).