The Road
By Cormac McCarthy
Why this book?
This story about a man and his son travelling across a vile, wasted America is stark, spare, and brutal. It’s also spare in its idea of family by casting a sickly man and his boy against a brutal, inhumane world as they depend on each other to survive. They are each other’s reason for remaining tethered to a life that has lost all meaning; but they are also each other’s reason for refusing to give in to the selfishness and inhumanity of a world that demands that of everyone trying to stay alive. This is the novel that cleaves my life as a writer into two unequal halves. After I had read it for the first time, I knew that something had to change about my writing because I saw how much was possible with so little.
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