Book 5

I finished my fifth book, The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, this week. A very bleak book, to the point of being depressing. I will admit up front that there was some nice writing in the book, some passages were very poetic. But there were some things that bothered me, not the least of which was the punctuation. I mean, did all the quotation marks die with all the people in the unnamed catastrophe? And the formatting of breaks between almost every paragraph made it hard to get into the flow of the book at first. But after a while these things faded into the background and even contributed to the monotonous struggle for survival of man and boy.

What didn't fade was the author's use of uncommon words when up to that point in the paragraph common words had worked just fine. Throwing in words like "gryke" (which I had to look up) and "hove," among others, jolted me out of the narrative. I'm sure the author had reasons for these words, but when used in conjunction with the simpler text that preceded them, the words seemed out of place. Maybe it was to compensate for using "okay" about 500 times in the dialogue.

Anyway, the book does an excellent job of presenting a world without hope, and the struggle that continues in such a place. Good world building, but it is not a world I want to visit. But the author knows his craft. I am not surprised it won the Pulitzer, but I couldn't bring myself to rate it higher than 3 stars on Goodreads. Don't pick it up if you want something uplifting.

My next book I started reading when I needed a break from The Road. It is called The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr. I've read a little (very little, to tell the truth) about how these technological tools that are supposed to put knowledge at our fingertips are actually detrimental to our learning. So far, I have been unimpressed with what I have read. However, The Shallows was a finalist for the General Nonfiction Pulitzer Prize last year, so I'm expecting something better here.