SueAnn Porter

Last summer while in Canada I picked up “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy. Big mistake.

I was going to re-gift* this book at my Writer’s Group party next week but I wanted to read it first.

First, let me confess: there are very few novels that I actually finish reading. They just don’t hold my interest. Exceptions to this are: “The Hunger Games” trilogy by Suzanne Collins, and anything by author Anna C. Bowling. A high school friend, Joy Hancock, wrote “Prescription for Madness”, which I read in two days. “Scheisshaus Luck” by Pierre Berg kept me turning pages. There are a scant few others.

As you can see from the cover, there are all kinds of blurbs to entice you to read this book. Don’t fall for it.

I know that Cormac McCarthy is a talented writer. But this book is NOT my cup of tea.

Like I said, I wanted to read it before re-gifting. We are doing “A Date With A Book” for our party, where we exchange gently used books with our fellow writers. It’s budget friendly and fun. But now I will have to check out my bookcases in the basement for a better pick.

I am only on page 45, and so far there have been several rain storms, snow squalls and wind storms. As the snowman on “Rudolph” says, “Brrr.”

{As a person who sadly lives in the Northeast and despises winter but can’t leave due to several pieces of a Chinese puzzle blocking the way out…reading about being cold is not my favorite hobby.}

In the story, the man and his son are walking “south” to find the land of warmth, I’m guessing with Rainbows and Unicorns, and Elves baking cookies in a hollow tree. SPOILER ALERT: They don’t find it. (I did skip to the end of the book to end my suspense.)

Besides being cold and shivering, and their feet being wet, there were other issues which bugged me.

1. A tractor trailer was overturned in the road, its tires flat. Why didn’t they cut the rubber from the tires to make new shoes? This is done in Peru in the present day.
2. Instead of describing finding food, the author had food suddenly appear. “He took the packet of cocoa from his jacket.” “They mixed it with a can of beans they had found earlier.” The shopping cart they pushed/pulled sounds more like Felix the Cat’s bag of tricks.
3. Water in rivers and lakes was described as “black”, yet when cooking they always had water. Was there also clean water in Felix’s Shopping Cart?

Maybe someone sitting on the beach, sweating into the sand would enjoy reading this book on a sunny day in August. But I’ll never know personally.

**

*Re-gifting a book for “A Date With A Book” is a current fad. See Pinterest for more info. But don’t forget to set an alarm. If you’re like me, researching on Pinterest quickly turns into two hours of lost time!