Because by the end of this book - which I soaked up, transfixed, in a day - I was a reader and writer transformed. Why I started with The Road and why I read it during a painful, angry, bleak period in my life really don't matter in the end.
But when I read reviews as passionate as Nandakishore Varma's or as insightful as Jay 's, who puts McCarthy on the same high rung as two of my favorite authors - Tim Winton and Colm Tóibín - I know I am missing something great. Grim, post-apocalyptic and hopeless are not for this reader who prizes sinking into a good story above all. So, I've always passed on Cormac McCarthy.Ĭertainly, The Road was never going to be my cuppa. With some significant exceptions, I've never been keen on books set in the Deep South or in America's West or in a dystopian near future. Then there are those celebrated writers who choose subjects or settings which don't much interest me. There are writers I have tried to read - really, I have - but whose styles made me want to engage in self-flagellation as the lesser of two tortures: William Faulkner, John Updike, Gabriel García Márquez, Virginia Woolf others whose classics I promise to tackle someday, when I'm smarter and less distracted: James Joyce, Nikolai Gogol, Mary Doria Russell, Herman Melville. There are large holes in my reading experience - works by acclaimed authors I ought perhaps to have read by now, novels which have created genres, shaped cultures and incited passions, pro and con.
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