Thoughts? Considering picking this up

Thoughts? Considering picking this up

be prepared for a really weird writing style

Yeah, this is one of the things that worries me. I checked out a pdf a while ago, and the writing style was just unnecessarily vague and difficult to read. I've also read some of the statements that he made regarding this style, and it seems that he is not just doing it because it's easier for him or because that's the way he feels it should be written. It's as if he's actually putting in effort to be incomprehensible.

It's not difficult at all. The diolague reads like a children's book:
Hey son
Yes
How are you feeling
Good


Otherwise the book is just descriptive prose.

It's a great way to display the desolation of the world though, the language is sparse and up front in a really weird way, as the other user said, it reads like a children's book, lots of run on sentences and such. It is fairly difficult to read purely because of how annoying the style is at first, but as you go through you get used to it and learn to appreciate how it adds to the narrative.

everyone always talks about how depressing this book is, when really it's an almost spielbergian level of hope and optimism about the survival of goodness and joy in even the most terrible of times

Thanks for the feedback, guess I'll give it a shot.

People seem to love it, I thought it was just kind of slow and depressing.

i thought it was boring as fuck desu senpai

YeCarthy is garbage, skip.

That's because Oprah hyped it. IMO it's far from his best work.

>this
It's not difficult to read. I'd skip this one honestly.

Really enjoyed it. It's a devastating and depressing book with some fantastic moments of tension and an unsettling atmosphere.

The writing style is pretty easy to follow, you'll get used to the lack of punctuation pretty quickly.

I don't understand how people think his style is weird, I find it incredibly beautiful.

This post is dreadfully misleading. I guess you could argue this is the case because the father and son continue travelling and never completely give up on themselves, but to say the book is almost "Spiebergian" is hyperbolic to say the least. You undermine how devastating the book actually is.

reread it
for every cannibal dungeon there is a bunker full of food; for every ravaged landscape a bounty-filled ship to explore. sure bad stuff happens but actually good stuff happens in equal measure, and the entire fucking obvious point of it is that hope endures in the darkest times (carrying the fire, a subtle metaphor you may have missed).
it's not a hopeless book, it's a book all about hope he wrote for his son about enduring love and how it will prevail

spielberg did something very similar in schindler's list, making a film of hope and triumph out of the holocaust

"Carrying the fire" wasn't particularly subtle, but while reading the book I believed it more to be the father's attempt to persuade the son that life isn't so bad, even though the father disagrees with this sentiment. For me, I saw that at face value it is to seem optimistic for the child when in actuality the father doesn't believe it one bit.

Although I guess you're somewhat right: for every negative, there were positives for the characters. I'd probably have to tally up which outweighs the other but I remember feeling that the positives were only temporary and the negatives were permanent.

that seems more like your bias than the obvious intent of the author, but i guess the author is dead so whatever

Subjectivity is bound to be biased.

I read it in two days, finished it last night. Honestly thought it wasn't really dark enough and that the kid was kind of a whiny bitch. Entertaining read and you get an almost tangible sense of pleasure when they find food. It seems a bit overrated w.r.t. how many awards it has won.

A freat read OP.

The emotional connection between the Man and his Boy feels very real and powerful.

The movie is also very well acted and shot.

It's good entry-level McCarthy