Book Group

I just finished reading "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy for our staff book group. It's a post-apocalyptic account of the journey of a Father and Son (we never know their names) south, in hope of finding any other 'good guys' who may have survived. It was hard to read at first, not for content, but because I've become used to editing everything I read--that's part of my job as a teacher. McCarthy uses unconventional sentence structure and puncutation (no apostrophe when an 'o' is the contraction) and doesn't divide the book into chapters. Once I got over that, I marveled at his amazing use of language. Reading the book was almost as physical as eating, and I wanted to stop and savor phrases and passages. It was depressing, of course, unless you like the idea of the human race approaching extinction, but the writing was incredibly rich. I'm looking forward to hearing what our leader has to say about the novel on Tuesday. Meanwhile, it's stuck fast in my head, and I'm trying to make sense of what McCarthy is saying to me.