Friends! It’s time for our fourth Book Club pick: get your orders in (and from what I’m told, some tissues handy), it’s The Road, by Cormac McCarthy.
About The Road
Cormac McCarthy’s tenth novel, The Road, is his most harrowing yet deeply personal work. Some unnamed catastrophe has scourged the world to a burnt-out cinder, inhabited by the last remnants of mankind and a very few surviving dogs and fungi. The sky is perpetually shrouded by dust and toxic particulates; the seasons are merely varied intensities of cold and dampness. Bands of cannibals roam the roads and inhabit what few dwellings remain intact in the woods.
Through this nightmarish residue of America a haggard father and his young son attempt to flee the oncoming Appalachian winter and head towards the southern coast along carefully chosen back roads. They struggle over mountains, navigate perilous roads and forests reduced to ash and cinders, endure killing cold and freezing rainfall. However, in The Road, such redemption as might be permitted by their circumstances depends on the boy’s ability to sustain his own instincts for compassion and empathy in opposition to his father’s insistence upon their mutual self-interest and survival at all physical and moral costs.
The Road was the winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Literature.
From cormacmccarthy.com
Find The Road
You can find the hard copy of The Road on Amazon, on Kindle at Amazon, on eBay, and the audio version on audible. Check your local library, the website of your State Library, and ebook borrowing sites online. Hard copies are available online at Booktopia, the Book Depository, and Abebooks (although that can take a while to ship). For in-store in Melbs, I love Brunswick Bound and Readings, but it should be available in your local, or they can get it in.
About the Veggie Mama Book Club
This is super-chill, read what you want, as much or as little as you want, participate however you want kind of book club. Maybe challenge yourself a little because that is a good thing, but let this not be a burden.
We’ll pick a book per month and discuss it both on the blog and in the Facebook group (and for locals, in real life, over a beverage and platter of some type).
You can share at any time anywhere with the hashtag #vmbookclub and you can tag me @veggie_mama. I am also open to suggestions at any time, and I look forward to us maybe getting out of our literary comfort zones and always learning something when we do, even if we don’t like the book itself. Or the author. Or Tuesdays. Or broccoli.
See you back here at the end of May for a bookish chat about The Road!
[…] actually finished this month’s pick The Road before I left as I didn’t want to read anything so heavy while I was away in a […]