A scary book, but not a new theme, and a predictable ending; made into a movie.

WILD RELEASE NOTES:

reducing my stack of books

I've been wanting to read this book for a long time. Thanks judysh for releasing it.

I'm going to take this book on vacation with me and if I finish it will probably release it somewhere down "the road".

I rented this movie last year so I knew the story. I think I would have been even more disturbed by the book than I was if I hadn't seen the movie.

It's a post-apocalyptic story. We never really find out what happened to cause almost all the people on earth (or at least in the US) to die and wipe out all plant and animal life. It was probably some nuclear war but there is no information on what lead up to it. The few people left alive have to subsist on canned food or resort to cannibalism. A man and his son are heading south to get away from the cold in the northern regions (I guess that means most people in Canada would have died or had to leave). They have run-ins with some other survivors but manage to avoid capture by the gangs that survive on cannibalism.

The one facet of the story that bothered me was that they seemed to stay on or near an interstate highway. Of course, all the towns and houses along the highway have long been ransacked and anything useful removed. On the rare occasions when they find a place that has anything useful it somehow has been overlooked by everyone else. I kept thinking "Why don't they head off into the countryside? Go someplace that was never very populated and where people probably did more canning and preserving? " I think that's what I would do.

The bond between the father and the son is particularly well explored. The boy's mother committed suicide rather than face the bleak future but the father saw it as his duty to give the boy the best chance to survive. It would have been easy to give up and use the one remaining bullet to kill the son and then somehow kill himself but he would not give in to that impulse. That is true heroism.

I'll take this book to the meet-up on Tuesday to see if anyone else in the group wants to read it.

I'll take this book to the meet-up tonight. If no-one takes it home it will be waiting on the OBCZ shelves for a new reader.

I've already read this book, but no one else snapped it up this evening, so I've snagged it to take in to our book exchange shelf at work. Although I found this to be a fairly depressing read, it is very well written and I found it hard to put down. It wouldn't feel quite right to say that I "enjoyed" reading The Road, but I did find it compelling and I'd recommend it to others.

Left on the book exchange shelf at work.