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GF Book Club - Book 6: THE ROAD by Cormac McCarthy


Guido
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I'm hoping this choice might get a few more people involved as it's pretty well known and the author is very talented and it wasn't written in the 19th century by a frickin RAKE like half the other ideas i had for the book choice.

 

Took it upon myself to pick this as no-one else said they wanted to pick and batchainpuller (who i asked) has been absent for a few days.

 

Anyways, hopefully not everyone has read it yet. Available from Amazon for £4.14 inc. p&p here. Only 256 pages but will probably give it longer than a month this time to better aid digestion.

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Usually I eat book pages as an orderve but a full one can take over a month to fully digest and then completely rid it from your system, best tip I can offer is to eat a mint for the digestion and sometimes yoghurt can help aid the inevitable stomach pains and help balance out the acidity. Asumming it's paperback of course as normally that will fill me up so never tried with hardback editions.

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Usually I eat book pages as an orderve but a full one can take over a month to fully digest and then completely rid it from your system, best tip I can offer is to eat a mint for the digestion and sometimes yoghurt can help aid the inevitable stomach pains and help balance out the acidity. Asumming it's paperback of course as normally that will fill me up so never tried with hardback editions.

 

if we're going to be picky then its hors d'oeuvres not orderve.

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A really good read this, I find McCarthy's writing style a bit hard to read at times, but he is an excellent story teller, some nice moments, a lot of shocking moments. I enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed No Country For Old Men.

 

Pretty much what I was about to say. A road to knowhere in particular but an enjoyable journey none the less.

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I found his style of writing hard to follow at first but I persevered and found the book an enthralling read. I genuinely had a lump in my throat when the kid's dad dies. The film was ok but the book was better. I felt the motto of the story was "Don't let any bastard eat your kids".

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Not too much to say yet as i'm only about 80 pages in as I started it last night, but i'm already absorbed. The descriptions of the landscape and of them passing through it are beautiful. There are similar passages in Blood Meridian and i've rarely read anything as accomplished. The sparse dialogue aids this, though when it comes it's perfectly weighted. This is a joy to read so i'm a bit gutted that i'm flying through it so quickly as i want it to last. This will likely become only the second author i've read where i'm prompted to read through their entire works. The first was Kafka but he only wrote 3 novels. 2011 is the year of McCarthy for me.

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Just finished it and i had goosebumps for 5 minutes afterwards. Quite a bit more action in the latter pages but the scenes on the beach are the ones that will stay with me forever. I felt genuinely paranoid myself at times and the feeling of uncertainty is there from the start - we don't know what was the catastrophic event that created this world.

 

As it neared the end I don't think i've read anything anywhere near as harrowing as their seemingly endless plight. I feel a bit worn out after reading it to be honest, which i guess shows how affecting the novel is and why it's so well-read. I'll never look at a tin of peaches the same way again.

 

Hope others get the time to read it if they haven't already.

Okay?

Okay.

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I read this in the second half of last year, it's a quite wonderful book. I can only echo what Guido has said, the description of the world they inhabit is mesmerizing and the relationship between the man and his son is beautifully observed. I really must get round to reading it again.

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the only thing I struggled with was it left me with a genuine sense of distress. I was made up that the lad found someone carrying the fire but he was still going off into a world of more of the same. For a while whenever i thought about it, I had to let out a little sigh.

 

The missus just said. The conjecture around the book is that he wrote it as he's getting into his 80's and he will leave a son without saying everything he has to say to him. The book is part of that process and fear.

 

And maybe that constant sense of emptiness and real lack of resolution is because we all never really say what we want to say and when we really think of it, it fills us with fear.

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I read this about a year ago. It is pretty harrowing but genuinely enjoyable. The big shock moment is as truly surprising as anything I'vre read. The two characters are superbly drawn.

 

I'm not buying the event as a nuclear winter by the way. I had it down as some kind of super-volcano/meteorite gig.

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I'll post this before reading others' posts...

 

I didn't like it. The dialogue didn't sit well with me, but then again, I do understand the lack of need for ambiguity or conversation beyond the necessary in their situation. It was emotionless and taut. I just like a bit of colour, I suppose.

 

I also appreciate the 'dip into' then 'dip out of' the lives of the protagonists. But I wanted a bit of context.

 

I liked it when they came across people as it added excitement. But it wasn't often enough, and we rarely got to find out anything about them after the meeting (the last two anyway).

 

It was excellently researched, but I didn't know the meaning of at least one word per page, which usually referred to part of a house / boat / building etc. I was reading "He took the ----- from the ------ and tied a ------ with the ------- and put it in the -------" a bit too often.

 

Overall, I liked some of the bleakness: I felt like I was there looking at the lead sea, for example, but overall I didn't enjoy the book.

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