Welcome to Litsy!

Book 4 finished for #FabulousFebruary and #20in4 @Andrew65

Oh my heart. 😭 Bleak, heartbreaking, and yet beautiful. I think this one will take a while to recover from.

#Two4Tuesday @TheSpineView

1. I don't care one bit about Valentine's Day, so if I have to receive anything let's keep it simple and say chocolate hearts filled with peanut butter. 😋

2. The Road - it's a brutal book, but a great illustration of parental love.

Tag @RaeLovesToRead @CBee @dabbe @Ruthiella @IndoorDame @Jari-chan

Many told me this was a sad, dark, and a bleak book. I won't disagree. I also would agree with author Ryan Holiday who calls it the greatest parenting book ever written. That is what struck me deeply. This was a book about fighting for your children. It is about undying love and the strength of the human spirit. McCarthy lights up his dark world with the brightness of love. Excellent read.

I've been warned this book is a must read but will be hard. I look forward to a book that moves me to my soul. Let's see.

Unique survival story-a man and a boy, no names used. The two have survived in a post apocalyptic world but just barely. Hunger, dehydration, and dodging slavers, cannibals, and thieves is a 24-7 reality. Exquisite writing-Pulitzer winner

#RushAThon Day 10 @Andrew65 @DieAReader @GHABI4ROSES

#2023Book68
This is easily one of my favorite books and every time I read it, I find new things that I immediately want to discuss with everyone.

This book is an excellent example of how skilled writing can make even the most depressing of stories worth reading.
A man and his son travel towards the ocean in a post apocalyptic world avoiding cannibals, slavers, and every other type of human left. They must decide what and who they are in circumstances that don‘t allow them many options.
3.5/5 stars. A great read, especially after The Last of Us. I am not sure if I like the ending.

Dicen que las mujeres sueñan con el peligro que acecha a sus seres queridos y que los hombres sueñan con el peligro que corren ellos mismos.

Olvidamos lo que queremos recordar y recordamos lo que preferiríamos olvidar.

I read this two days ago and still processing. It was on my TBR for too long but McCarthy‘s recent passing prompted me to pick it up now. Frightening and thought provoking despite its simplicity. Highly recommend.

This was surprisingly good. It‘s an award-winner (usually a bad sign for me), and I didn‘t like the other book I‘ve read by this author. I found it interesting that neither of the characters had a name. It was slow-moving, and often not much happened (though there were a few things that happened along the way that got the blood pumping!), but I really liked it.

#SummerSpecial #Survival Dark & devastating. It‘s 99 degrees at 8:44 am , maybe 114 to 117 in Phoenix,Az.today.Talk about survival!

30 Book Recommendations in 30 Days — Day 22 “The Road,” by Cormac McCarthy

I read this book in February and it still hasn‘t crawled out of my brain. Horrifying depictions of humanity‘s worst and best.

Interesting NYT article on the changes in the publishing industry, and how Cormac McCarthy would not have a shot at a successful career in today's world. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/19/opinion/cormac-mccarthy-publishing.html

I read some great books this week, but in lieu of stats & discussion of books read for #weeklyreport I want to honor Cormac McCarthy. I have read only a couple of books by him, but The Road is one of the best books I have read the past few years. Although he died of natural causes & lived a long life, the world definitely feels poorer without his presence.
Contemporaries & critics pay tribute (Link in comments):

I was so sad to hear about Cormac McCarthy's passing earlier this week. 💔 Thank you for all the wonderful stories.

Unpopular opinion: this was not for me. I think the premise is intriguing. But there is so much that doesn‘t feel convincing: Mainly why would anyone want to continue living in a barren inhospitable horrifying world? And it is truly horrifying and devastatingly bleak.

Shit https://www.npr.org/2023/06/13/598425063/cormac-mccarthy-dies-obituary oh to add to my sorrow , Wade Goodwyn died of cancer at 63 earlier this week. Though he worked at Tx NPR, his stories sometimes went national, and that voice!

Rip https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/13/books/cormac-mccarthy-dead.html

17-20 Mar 23 (audiobook)
Sparsely written and very bleak, this is nevertheless a compelling tale of a man‘s struggle to keep his kind-hearted son alive in a brutal post-apocalyptic world. Another novel that seemed fantastical a decade ago but now seems increasingly prophetic. The love that a parent has for their child, and the lengths they are willing to go to to preserve that child, is difficult to describe but McCarthy does a commendable job.

I‘m really in the mood for post-apocalyptic content after finishing The Last of Us on HBO (loved it, an all-time fave season of TV for me). Enter this, which I had never read, and actually I‘ve never read any Cormac McCarthy, fearing it was too brutal for me. This was brutal, but not in a way I couldn‘t handle. I loved the writing and language. The boy was just so sweet, and I spent a lot of time thinking about how he stayed that way.

I have been reading, watching and playing a lot of post-apocalyptic, dystopian stories lately, but none of them strike as hard as The Road. McCarthy‘s bleak style creates something that can‘t really be found in any other disaster fiction. I enjoyed it even more than during my first read some ten years ago.

So. Very. Bleak. I think McCarthy killed some of my optimism. A tale of love and hope filled with sadness and consumed by it. “You forget what you want to remember and remember what you want to forget.”

#12booksof2022 Father & son try to survive in a post apocalyptic world .Such a dark , powerful read . so my 12 days of Christmas Booklist now done , this was the book for December. I was blessed in December, in a sense, a three tie.”Joan is Okay “by Weike Wang & “Mrs.Palfrey at The Claremont “ by Elizabeth Taylor were brilliant!

What a beautifully written bucket of misery this book is.A father & son in a post apocalyptic world just trying to survive.Anyone would be assumed to be the enemy , they would need what you have.Bleak yet beautiful.I admired the fathers instincts & fortitude,how he makes the most of found objects,moves towards a temperate climate.It feels like a warning to us all.⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Well , it has the word Christmas in it , but this book is definitely not very Christmassy!🫤😄

📚Road*Ripley Under Ground*Rebecca*Return of the King*Red Harvest*Rashomon & 17 Other Stories
🖋️ Rushdie*Rulfo*Rilke
🎬Roadgames*Raging Bull*Rear Window Rabbitproof Fence*Rosemary's Baby*Raid 2
🎙️ Radiohead*Roots**Rufus Wainwright*RTJ*Regina Spektor*Rachel's*REM
🎧The Rip (Porridge Radio)*Rock the Casbah (Clash)*Radio (Lana Del Rey)*Rock & Roll (Velvet Underground)*Remember the Day (Sibylle Baier)*The Rip (Portishead)*Running Up that Hill 👇

So hard to read, but so good 😩

#campfires #OminousOctober
@Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks @Eggs
#TeamMonsterMash @StayCurious #scarathlon2022

1. I like both, but I‘ll go with post-apoc!
2. The tagged book is one of my very favorites, but I also love The Stand by Stephen King and Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. There‘s just something so hopeful about a post-apocalyptic world that values Shakespeare! 🥰
#Two4Tuesday

1. I think I have enjoyed both but post-apocalyptic wins by a thread.
2. The Road, I gobbled it up and it still haunts me. When I worry about the state of the world, I thing of this book becoming reality, it‘s chilling. I‘m not sure I “recommend it” but it scared the hell out of me.
@TheSpineView You have a nice day too!☺️
Thank you for the tag @Kshakal #Two4Tuesday

#Two4Tuesday @TheSpineView

1. Post-Apocalyptic, I suppose, although there's been a glut of those books recently.

2. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. Works nicely as a parable about life and parenthood.

Tag @RaeLovesToRead @CBee @IuliaC @MegaWhoppingCosmicBookwyrm

With an understated tone, McCarthy managed to both shock me and move me to tears more than once. It‘s amazing how little you need in the background to tell a good story. This novel doesn‘t thrill, but I still sped through it, and I loved it enough to watch the movie the same day I finished

"The kind of breakdown of civilized living that happens, and could occur in an even more terrifying way, is described in McCarthy's novel The Road... What is so disconcerting is the fact that it did not seem to dawn on so many who read and 'enjoyed' this book that something like this really could happen. We human beings are fully capable of bringing such a situation about and behaving as described." - Richard Harries, The Beauty and the Horror

The Road makes you think about things from a different prospective. Looking back at the story I enjoyed it, but I also hate reading it. No quotations, fragmented sentences, no names, no character development or climax. It just exists. If you like world building and answers, this is not the book for you.

Wow, what a sad story.

A father who will go to the ends of the earth to protect his son in a post-apocalyptic world. You can really feel the soul destroying desperation as he struggles to keep himself and his son alive.

It‘s beautifully written, but heartbreaking.

Okay I think this is an unpopular opinion, but I didn't think The Road was boring at all. I think the pared back language set a bleak and pessimistic mood in a way that vivid imagery of a walk through a barren, post-apocalyptic landscape wouldn't have been able to accomplish. I think it's harder to forgo embellishments and trust one's reader. I give this book five stars, easily.

My sinus infection got the best of me today. I had to take a sick day, but I've gotten through most of this novel. 🙌 Also, I'm strangely craving chocolate so thank goodness these Raisinets were buried in my cabinet. 🤣

I've read it three times so far.