The Road and the road

I just (literally, just) finished reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road. It just about killed me. I started reading it last night -- big mistake. Once you start, you don't want to put it down and, more to the point, you don't want to put it down at night. Especially if you happen to be spending the evening in a suburb that is dead quiet except for the crunching sound you can hear through the wall of your bedroom. Perhaps, it's just the wind smashing the dead branches of the rhododendron into the house... or cannibal zombies are trying to eat their way through the vinyl siding. Who knows? Anyhow, I managed to fall asleep eventually. And then I got up, drove myself to Old Lyme to do a little research (FINALLY) on my thesis, and then I came back at 3:30, starving, having stupidly failed to eat breakfast or lunch.
And now I've finished The Road. It's an odd book, and that's not attributed to the post-apocalyptic theme, but to the fact that the story has bits and pieces of what can only be referred to as murky poetic mulling. One minute, "the man" is no longer rummaging through the skeleton of some decrepit, ashy boat; the next, we get a paragraph of inexplicable ruminations. Also, in the beginning there are alot of clauses masquerading as sentences and repeated usage of the word "shorn." This disappears soon enough. Of course, it's a brilliant book, scary as all hell in the raw realism of it, and deeply emotional.
Do read it... but not until the spring when the days are longer.
Tomorrow, I head to Princeton, New Jersey to help my friend Smita drive down to Florida in her new blue Prius. So I'll be gone road-tripping it all weekend and fly back Monday.