The Road Review

I almost never feel moved, become sentimental or overwhelmed while reading a book. People have been throwing me books to read attemtping to fill my eyes with tears, but usually they failed to do so. Yes, I am not much of an emotional person; plus I literally hated reading until the start of my senior year. Once I held a book in my hands I usually ended up dozing off in a few minutes--in other words, books acted as a sleeping pill for me. AP Literature class, whether I like reading or not, keeps me awake while I read, surprsingly.

This book was different though. I tried my best not to tear up. Well, yes, I might be exaggerating a little in terms of being sad--but it was that close. "He slept close to his father that night and held him but when he woke in the morning his father was cold and stiff." (pg. 281) Not only this sentence came to me as a sudden shock, but it approached me as if my own relative died. That's the style I like about McCarthy. The change of scenes are so abrupt, that not only do I have to be alert for what is to come next but it also removes the dramatic aspects away from the book just like our reality. For instance, when the man and his son confronted a man who stole their cart, the transition from a happy walk along the beach to an urgent atmosphere was drastic: "The tarp was gone. Their blankets" (pg. 253).  On the other hand, most fictional books had so many dramatic features in them that eventually I started avoiding them.



Asteroid Strike

 The cause for the disasterous perishment of the country still remains in veil. The author never explained the cause to the catastrophe, except depicting burned corpses and properties. Some of my friends told me that the reason to such demolishment was due to resource depletion, therefore people became lawless in order to survive. However, I think it is more probable that the cause to such destruction was from a natural disaster--in this case, a comet strike. Pretty much the whole world had been combusted, and some corpses even remained on their beds proving that the disaster came as a sudden. Then again the man seemed to know something was to come because: "He dropped to one knee and raised the lever to stop the tub and then turned on both taps as far as they would go" (pg. 52~53). I guess it's an open end. Actually the book itself ended in an open end, because the kid was picked up by an unknown man and his family, not letting the readers know the result.

The book contained so many themes including: survival, love, evil, justice, dooms-day and death. I really want to rewatch to movie properly, so I can see the difference between the book and the movie. It is one of the best books I have read so far, and certainly the kind of book I would like to keep.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy