books similar to the road by cormac mccarthy

MAN: Well, clearly we’ll die if we stay here. MAN AND BOY: *find safe house with enormous amount of food*

MAN: Everyone on the road except us is bad.īOY: Okay, but what about *valid concern* MAN: Do we still have the gun? We must preserve the bullets. The whole story is an endless, repeating cycle. The literary world is full of good post-apocalypse/dystopian fiction (to name a few: The Hunger Games, The Handmaid’s Tale, 1984, The Giver, Unwind, etc.), so I don’t know why The Road has endured. Now I’m bewildered, because there is nothing in The Road that appeals to modern sensibilities. I assumed it was written back when there were only a few writers and therefore little competition and low standards when it came to plot and characters. I was shocked to find out that this was published in 2006. To be fair, it didn’t take much to distract me from On the Road. McCarthy keeps some and dispenses with others, and I found it extremely distracting. If you must eradicate apostrophes (there is no reason to ever do this, but let’s pretend for a second), do so consistantly. Use them where they’re supposed to be used. Apostrophes aren’t meaningless flourishes. Quotation marks were invented for a reason. Also, I’m simply not on board with “creative” or “stylistic” choices when it comes to punctuation. Like, if someone told me that McCarthy got paid by the word and that he got paid extra for every time that the word was “okay” I would 100% believe it. The apocalypse has apparently destroyed all quotations marks, half the world’s apostrophes, and any vocabulary beyond the word “okay.” Neither “character” in the novel has a personality or even a name. If you liked it, you may want to find a different review. I have nothing positive to say about this book. The Road may not be my absolute least favorite book of all time… but it’s in the running. However, I was not fully prepared for just how much I’d be bored out of my mind. I hate anything by John Steinbeck or Ernest Hemingway). Classic novels are extremely hit or miss for me (for example, I LOVE Jane Eyre, Les Misérables, anything by Jane Austen, The Scarlet Pimpernel, etc. I knew this book was a classic, so I knew there would be some risk of not liking it. In other words, I just spent two weeks reading what is very possibly the most boring, pointless book of all time and I don’t even get to cross it off my list.Ī man and his son slog down an apocalyptic road.

I picked up the latter the novel listed is the former. There’s On the Road by Jack Kerouac and there’s The Road by Cormac McCarthy. There are two classic novels with nearly identical titles. I didn’t actually bring my list to the library with me, which was a critical mistake. I have very, very slowly been making my way down one of those 100 Books to Read Before You Die lists.

Books similar to the road by cormac mccarthy