If you read one book...

In the front window of the Hotel Monteleone on Royal Street in New Orleans there is a quote from Truman Capote that expresses the sentiment that the real beauty of writing is not in the stories themselves but in the sound and feel of the words. There are times when I have that feeling, but they tend to be very few and far between. This morning, however, I finished reading one of those kind of books; a book so rich in language, so bathed in linguistic beauty, that the near horror of the storyline is completely eclipsed by the exquisite luxury of words pouring over you like a summer waterfall in a mountain stream.

The plot line of Cormac McCarthy's The Road follows a man and a boy on a never ending cross-country trek through a post-apocalyptic world of hunger, danger, and pain. There are no chapters to break the flow of the inexorable journey as the reader is taken along as a third companion through this world that seems at once too familiar and terribly strange.

Along the way, there are moral questions that are raised and sometimes answered. We are never told the source of the devastation, it just is. It is a story that you want to turn away from, but find that you can't. The reader must wrestle with the difficulties of this world, and these lives, like Jacob with the angel. On some level, by the end of The Road there is no turning back. The reader is forced, by taking the journey, to in some sense take a stand. This may be to seek a way to secure the future from such devastation, or it may be to hold the ones you love especially close.

Above all... the gift of The Road is the gift of language. The story is hard, but the language, and the spell it weaves, is lovely.

Read this book.