mostly harmless books

Technically, it wasn’t on the road. I read the book in bed. But ‘in bed with Cormac McCarthy’ sounded too lame, and didn’t include the book title in an oh so clever pun (I wonder how many newspapers also used this title).

Last year I heard some guy called McCarthy won the Pulitzer. Good for him, now what’s for dinner? I don’t care for literary awards very much, my backlog of books is too big to let me worry about new things that don’t sound extraordinary.

But then a friend of mine (who knows about my love of books where half the population of the globe dies), told me it was a post-apocalyptic story - and a damn good one. Fast forward a couple of months later, I finally read The Road.

In short: I liked it. I didn’t love it.

It was scary sometimes, heartbreaking at others, intriguing at times… However, I missed some background. I’m sure this was the author’s intention, not to offer any clue about the catastrophe that left the States (the world?) almost deserted, but I wanted more clues. Maybe it’s a mainstream thing? If you explain it, it become SF, if you don’t, it’s “real literature”? It reminds me of Paul Auster’s In the Country of Last Things, same kind of story of a cataclysm with no explanation whatsoever.
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