The Road - Cormac McCarthy

the road
cormac mccarthy
c. 2006
256 pages (15 read)
stopped reading 3/29/2010

read for: before i die challenge, ew new classics

*may contain spoilers*

So normally my book policy is that I have to read 100 pages before I abandon a book. I feel that that gives me quite a bit of time to decide I really do hate something. Also, if it's a short book that I hate it's easy to convince myself to finish if I've already read 100 pages. I can't do that with this book. I just can't. It's amazing I got to page fifteen. Even with the fact that it took five days to read fifteen pages, normally I would push myself to keep going, but I can not tell you with any certainty a single thing that happened in those fifteen pages. I think there's a father and son and they have a shopping cart and maybe a tarp...but those details could have come from seeing the movie trailer not from reading the book. And surprise, surprise...I don't think it's the story's fault for me abandoning this so early. Even though I know that this is a post-apocalyptic story (which is something I normally avoid) I haven't gotten to enough story for that to possibly be the cause. Instead, I can't get past the author's writing choices. I'm sorry, but the English language has writing grammar and punctuation rules for a reason. I don't find it stylistic or in any way appealing when those things are so blatantly abandoned. I suppose there are exceptions (such as dialogue), but for an entire novel to be written without quotation marks for instance is too much for me to deal with. And so I choose not to put myself through the irritation of trying to read this book. Maybe I'll watch the movie in order to get to experience the story. Or maybe not.

1/5