Been a while since I updated. Haven't had much to say other than I'm still dawdling around my various fics, trying to scrape together enough passages for an update. My attention span and work schedule aren't cooperating.

But I'm updating now with a book recommendation. I'm about 3 years late in reviewing this book and a movie adaptation is coming out soon, but better late than never. A friend mailed me The Road by Cormac McCarthy (author of No Country for Old Men). She said it was just my style, and laughed.

I lay down in bed last night at 1 AM and thought I'd just flip through a few pages of The Road, read it over the course of a week maybe. I ended up staying up til 3 to finish it. After I closed it, the simple act of opening my bedroom door and stepping toward the bathroom was like entering an alien world. Reality, yeah. It was jarring to see my reflection in the mirror, as it reminded me immediately of a certain sentence in the book, one of many striking moments the author wove into this masterpiece.

Basic premise: An unnamed Man and his son, just called the Boy, are trying to survive in a postapocalyptic world. We're thrown into this bleak atmosphere right away, where everything is gray and broken and dead and unmoving. The analogies and pervasive sense of muted color start to sink into your skin after just a few pages. The stilted sentences take a little getting used to, but they are just a tool for constructing this dead world, as if the reader too is hobbling along on an old crutch, without a destination, but without a reason to stop going forward, either.

The Man and Boy are journeying toward the shore, trudging through a frozen wintry landscape in what used to be America; there is nothing living in sight; they have only scavenged cans of food as sustenance, and they constantly run out. The Man sometimes recalls snippets of the "old" world, when there was life; the Boy was born after the apocalypse and can only imagine.

At first I read on because I wanted to find out what had happened to the world. Was it a meteor storm? A nuclear war? But then I began to suspect that the author would never tell. It's not the point of the story. Then, my motive for reading on was out of anticipation for the Man and Boy to meet another human being...or something alive. I wondered briefly if this was another one of those zombie books. The whole apocalypse thing seemed supernatural enough. But again I was wrong. There is nothing supernatural in this novel. There are just humans. And that makes the story all the more horrifying.

A la Lord of the Flies and many other "degeneration of humanity" novels, The Road peels away layer after layer of what makes a human a person, what makes life worth living, and why people would live on even when life is no longer worth living. It takes a scalpel to everything that is manmade in our assumptions of what life is. Life is not 9-5 workdays with a weekend of rest, a calendar of 365 days and a handful of holidays, a car and a house and a spouse to love and children to raise and send to school. In this novel, there is nothing except not dying.

The Man and Boy meet other humans. I won't give away what exactly happens during their encounters, but it just gets bleaker and bleaker. Perhaps the best descriptor of what humanity has become is in the following passage, perhaps my favorite out of all the great passages McCarthy crafted. Warning - it's the most frightening passage in the book, in my opinion.

*

He woke whimpering in the night and the man held him. Shh, he said. Shh. It's okay.

I had a bad dream.

I know.

Should I tell you what it was?

If you want to.

I had this penguin that you wound up and it would waddle and flap its flippers. And we were in that house that we used to live in and it came around the corner but nobody had wound it up and it was really scary.

Okay.

It was a lot scarier in the dream.

I know. Dreams can be really scary.

Why did I have that scary dream?

I don't know, but it's okay now. I'm going to put some wood on the fire. You go to sleep.

The boy didn't answer. Then he said: The winder wasn't turning.

*

And that's only near the beginning, as foreshadowing. There are too many beautiful, chilling passages for me to remember.

The only problem I had was with the ending. Other reviewers have praised it, but I felt it didn't quite fit. The last paragraph is breathtaking, though. And everything leading up to the ending is amazing, worth staying up til 3 AM on a workday to read.

So, if you've read this journal entry up to here, I hope that you'll somehow find a copy of The Road and get started. Or watch the movie. Viggo Mortensen plays the father. He seems perfectly cut out for the role. I can't wait to watch it.