Sorta book-review
.n

1. An attempt to review a book without really knowing anything about it other than having read it.
2. A review that speaks to the experience, but should not be taken seriously, at least for the most part.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Recently, and by recently I mean like a month ago, I finished reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy. It only took me about 4 months to finish reading, mostly due to the fact that I would only read it for about 10 minutes once every weekday on my short LRT ride from Bay Station to Health Sciences. I’m not much of a “sit at home and read” kind of guy, but, from what I remember, this was an interesting read.

What made it interesting? Well, for one, the characters are never named. Not once. It’s The Man and The Boy, except not capitalized as I just did for emphasis. What else? It’s a post-apocalyptic tale, those are always fun right? You delve deep into what brought mankind to doom its fortunate/unfortunate survivors to wandering down the road in clothes they’ve found, pushing a shopping cart full of canned food that hopefully hasn’t gone bad, carrying a pistol with 3 rounds left… oh, sorry, what’s that? Oh that’s right, thanks for reminding me: you never actually find out what caused the apocalypse, just that some people are good and some people are bad and everyone’s just trying to survive.

Oh, there is another thing worth mentioning about this book: the grammar. I was thoroughly confused by the usage of apostrophes and commas in this book because their usage was erratic. One paragraph you’re moseying along and everything seems good but then all of sudden there’s no apostrophe in a word that clearly needed one, or a run-on sentence that required a break, or a pause. I think at one point I was reading a long sentence and I heard that sentence say to me “Dude, I’m tired, grab a pencil and throw a comma in me.” And before you go accusing me of my terrible punctuation and grammar; remember that Im an engineer that took English 199 (aka, English for Engineers) so Ima certified expertitian, a’ight?!

Now I do have to say that the story feels realistic or at least as realistic as a man and his son pushing a shopping cart down a road heading south to avoid the oncoming winter with a gun with one bullet and 5 wooden ones can be. (Hi, this is the previous sentence speaking. Here’s a pencil, please put a comma somewhere in me. I don’t care where, I just can’t go on like this.) They stop at pretty much every abandoned house in the country to look for food and they only build fires when it can’t easily be seen. They threaten anyone who comes near them with their gun wanting only to be left alone to fend for themselves. I mean, that’s probably what I would do in that situation, if, of course, I was even still alive at this point in this post-apocalyptic world.

Now, reading what I’ve written so far you might think I wasn’t such a huge fan of this book. You’d be mistaken, at least for the most part. While it’s not a book I’m running out to tell all of my friends about, it has its merits, and if you were at all interested in reading it before reading this sorta book-review, I would probably still suggest you do so. After all, it did win a Pulitzer Prize somehow so people somewhere must have LOVED it enough to bestow such an honour on Mr. McCarthy.