The Road

This is one of those few times where Oprah Winfrey's taste and mine match, if ever. On Wednesday, she picked "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy, as her new Oprah Book Club pick.

I know this because it popped up on the Chapters-Indigo website last night, but also because today we had about 900 trade paperback copies in the store (ok, so I exaggerate).

Anyways, I read it in hardcover, i.e. before the force of nature that is Oprah Winfrey picked this title out of the billions found in the masses to be placed in the sales-inducing canon that she's created. It was on a lot of top ten lists for books in the US for 2006, which was one reason why I chose to read it. And I really liked the book.

The basic premise is a father and son who's on a journey to the sea in a post-apocalyptic future where nothing living remains, except for the straggling remnants of humanity here and there. It's a tale of survival, and the bond between them that makes them desperate enough to keep on living.

What makes McCarthy's setting so terrifying is not the presence of monsters or mutant zombies or what not. It's the complete absence of life. The thought that the wide, wide, world is more or less empty just chilled me to the bone. It doesn't burden the reader with words, but it's still vivid enough that you feel you are there wandering with them, hungry with them, cold with them. It was the atmosphere that made the book for me.

But while I liked it, I don't think I could read it again for a long time because it depressed the hell out of me. It's a bleak book and to me, it's not one of those novels where there are chapters that could be read and re-read all the time.

It'll be interesting to see whether the people who tend to buy books based on her recommendations will continue to do so with this title.