Reading....

Okay, so my sister has introduced me to this great website where you can list ten books or more and then start swapping with other people all over the United States (and its territories.) By the way...if you should happen to sign up to join this free website (all you pay is postage to swap any book - PLEASE enter my email address ( d_erskine[at]verizon.net ) under the referral information so that I can get a credit for a free book!

Anyway...I've been doing a lot of reading. I have more time to do that since Olivia has started school again. In fact, I'm getting a lot more accomplished than I usually get accomplished now that she's in school --her room is almost clean - still sorting through some clothes and toys, items are being listed and sold on Ebay and I'm stacking wood! ahem. Again...I digress...

Two nights ago - I couldn't sleep. I started a book which I got from the swap entitled, The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize - this novel is one in which you will be so drawn that you'll wish but hate for it to end. I could not put it down. I finished it before 24 hours was up and don't recall the last time I read a book in 24 hours or less. One reviewer said this (and I couldn't agree more:) "A work of such terrible beauty that you will struggle to look away. You will read on, absolutely convinced, thrilled, mesmerised."

As I am not the best at writing book critiques, I leave you with the following which I borrowed from another source. Read the book. It's a good one. All I can say is God help those who may have to endure what the characters of this book endure.

A man and a boy, father and son, "each the other's world entire," walk a road in "the ashes of the late world." McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005) envisions a postapocalyptic scenario. Cities have been destroyed, plants and animals have died, and few humans survive. The sun is hidden by ash, and it is winter. With every scrap of food looted, many of the living have turned to cannibalism. The man and the boy plod toward the sea. The man remembers the world before; as his memories die, so, too dies that world. The boy was born after everything changed. The man, dying, has a fierce paternal love and will to survive--yet he saves his last two bullets for himself and his son. Although the holocaust is never explained, this is the kind of grim warning that leads to nightmares. Its spare, precise language is rich with other explorations, too: hope in the face of hopelessness, the ephemeral nature of our existence, the vanishing worlds we all carry within us. McCarthy evokes Beckett, using repetition and negation to crushing effect, showing us by their absence the things we will miss. Hypnotic and haunting, relentlessly dark, this is a novel to read in late-night solitude. Though the focus never leaves the two travelers, they carry our humanity, and we can't help but feel the world hangs in the balance of their hopeless quest. A masterpiece. -Keir Graff
(Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.)