Books: The Road

Finding an appealing book to read on an airline flight can be difficult. Unless you shop ahead, you're limited to whatever scraps of reading material you can find in the airport newsstands. So you can see why on my recent visit to Chicago, I was elated to find that a 3-hour layover allowed me to browse a small bookstore in the Philadelphia terminal. There, I managed to pick up "The Road," a book by Cormac McCarthy.

It's a short book - short enough to read in one sitting, if you really had the time. It tells the story of a father and son roaming through the ashes of a burned American wasteland. I've read a lot of post-apocalyptic stories, but nothing rendered with the starkness of McCarthy's prose. In the more laconic passages, it's almost like reading poetry.

McCarthy also omits punctuation from the character dialogue - no quotation marks to be found. Normally, I dislike this sort of technique, finding it more of an affectation than anything else. "The Road," though, is about the demise of civilization - and so the omission makes sense from both a logical and a literary perspective. In any case, "The Road" is well worth a look.