The Road

OK, so I've complained a lot about driving all the way through Georgia non-stop to get home from Disney World, but there was one really good thing that came of it. I read The Road.

I bought this Oprah pick a few weeks ago but with Relay, I didn't have a chance to start it. I also wanted to finish The Book Thief before I started anything else. (You may have read my post raving about it when I first started it back in April; I got side-tracked and didn't read much for a while, but when I did finish it, it had one of the most satisfying endings of any book I've read in years; I cried the night I read the last pages.) I threw The Road in the back of the car before we left for Disney with high hopes that I would have time to read at night. Jason and I got caught up in Wonder Years reruns after putting Ainsley to bed instead. But it worked out for the best as The Road really is a wonderful companion for an arduous road trip.

This book was listed as Entertainment Weekly's best novel of 2006, and guest columnist Stephen King sang its praises in two separate literary columns last year. Then Oprah picked it, so I almost gave it a pass, because I haven't had much luck with liking Oprah's sometimes pretentious book picks. It proved to be just as amazing as Uncle Stevie said in his reviews, though, so I am glad she encouraged this book to the masses.

It is not the feel-good beach read of the summer. It is a spare apocalyptic story of a man and his son, one of only a handful survivors of a never-fully-explained earth-ending holocaust. In what seems to be a coming nuclear winter, the man and his boy hit the road to go south in search of warmth, food, and hopefully, more "good-guy" survivors. As they travel, they must stay hidden from the "bad guys", bands of marauders who enslave and cannibalize other survivors in this dead world. There are scenes almost too horrible to read, but for 8 hours from northern Florida to an hour north of Atlanta, I couldn't put it down.

I got so absorbed in this novel that even though Jason and I were supposed to swtich off driving duties in Atlanta, Jason offered to keep driving so I could finish it (and so Ainsley could keep sleeping.) When I did finish it, I bawled. Reading it was such an emotional experience, especially reading the way I did, going through a journey myself; you get so vested in seeing the characters get to their promised land.

I do wish I had taken longer to read it. I can imagine how much more devastating and beautiful the ending would have been if I'd spent weeks instead of hours getting to know those characters and letting them live in my heart and head. On the other hand, I don't know if I could have put it down long enough to stretch the reading experience out.

Pick it up if you want a dark but redeeming power of love and survival.

I am trying to not get too involved in anything else this week because Harry Potter is on his way (and I also want to savor The Road a little longer.) If you happen to read it, come back to the blog and let me know what you thought.