Okay, here’s the rundown for the month:

• Circus of the Damned – Laurell K. Hamilton
• The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
• The Lunatic Cafe - Laurell K. Hamilton
• The Road - Cormac McCarthy
• Night Watch – Terry Pratchett

I have to say, that even if you didn’t like The Road as a movie, the book is haunting and beautiful.

A few friends of mine had problems  with the movie’s plot or conflict, or seeming lack thereof.  I think that’s a slightly shallow assessment of the entire thing, especially having now read the book. See, the conflict comes partly from the daily struggle to survive (in a narrative sense, I suppose you could say Man vs. Nature), and also from the Man’s inner turmoil (Man vs. Himself) over whether his Boy’s survival will be worth his effort in the end.  Even after the Man’s wife gives up and decides to die, the Man continues to struggle every day (carrying “the fire”) with his little boy so that perhaps the boy can grow up prepared to face the future (”…if he is not the word of god then god never spoke”).

But why would one want to bring up a child in this world of cannibals and starvation and the endless grey skies?  Would the Man have the strength to kill the child if they were ambushed by the bad guys, kill him to spare him from a worse fate? This is what the Man and his Boy face every day, and this is why I loved both the book and the movie. The doubt, the questions. Could he do it? Maybe but…  Should he do it? Probably but…  I find the Man vs. Himself theme the most profoundly interesting of all the other themes out there (yes, even Man vs. Machine a la Terminator 2).

Add to it the grim background of a destroyed world, devoid of food, water, ammunition, and shelter (one of my favorite settings), all rendered by an author who has absolutely mastered the English language to the point where even the simplest of phrases is poetic… and you have this award winning, incredible book.

Listen to me, he said, when your dreams are of some world that never was or some world that never will be, and you’re happy again, then you’ll have given up. Do you understand? And you can’t give up, I won’t let you. (The Man, The Road)

So, now, I’m attempting to start chipping away again at the two lists I’ve been picking books from: The BBC’s Top 100 and the 10 Most Disturbing Books of All Time.  The Terry Pratchett book is from the former, and I purchased American Psycho this past weekend. I suppose I won’t get to it, though, until February. When I finally finish that one, I will have finished 3 of the 10 books on that list. And I’ll still have 11 more months to complete it!

But hey! It’s been a productive month for reading.

So, tentatively for next month:

• American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis
• Brisingr - Christopher Paolini
• Bloody Bones – Laurell K. Hamilton
• Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters – Ben H. Winters
• Let the Right One In – John Ajvide Lindqvist

Categories : books, lists