I finally read and finished Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. My main motivation was a book group (which I missed after all), but I picked up this book so many times without finishing in the past couple of years that it was immensely satisfying to have finally read it.

Everyone knows it’s a bleak story. About as bleak as they come. I was pregnant the first time I really tried to read it, which was STUPID. The next time I tried seriously, Massimo was a few months old. Even MORE STUPID. If you are expecting a child or have a child under one year of age, DO NOT ATTEMPT TO READ THIS BOOK. For you will fail. It felt like McCarthy was trying to tear out my happy little heart and eat it raw.

But this time, Massimo was 18 months old. Still young, but not so young that I’m giddy and on cloud nine. This time, reading The Road felt more like an attempt to peacefully (which is not to say nicely) stop my heart, while leaving it in place. It is bleak. Heart-breaking. Tear-inducing. Breath-taking. Horrifying. Everything you would expect a post-apocalyptic, dystopic story to be. That said, I sailed through it in two days. That’s some quick reading for the working parent of a toddler. It is a story you want to get through as quickly as possible. How McCarthy managed to live within that story for the duration of writing it (how long did it take, I wonder?), I cannot imagine. When I was younger, I spent years exploring dark places of the mind and history. For a while I thought it desensitized me, but I think it actually had the opposite effect. Two days was about all I could handle of The Road.

A note about the ending: Some people say it’s positive. I saw it that way, possibly because I needed to see it that way. However, if I project the story and follow it into the future, I don’t see any real hope. Where the book ends is a positive blip in an ultimately hopeless situation. There were several positive blips throughout the book, followed by terrible things. There’s no reason to think it will change. How’s that for an ending?

US

UK

From the UK publisher’s site:

Homer called salt a divine substance. Plato described it as especially dear to the gods. As Mark Kurlansky so brilliantly relates in his world encompassing new book, salt has shaped civilisation from the beginning, and it’s story is a glittering, often surprising part of the history of mankind.

If you take a look at Random House’s Salt website, you can see that they have a little animation that relates back to the UK cover design. But I still don’t get it. The hand looks weird, and the desert photo just doesn’t say anything special to me. I do like the Salt lettering, though. Very much. I’m not thrilled by the US cover, but I think it works and makes sense and looks good. But it mainly wins here because I dislike the UK cover and feel somewhat neutral about the US cover. What do you think?

It took a while, but I’ve finally added my photos from the Frankfurt Book Fair to flickr. Take a look.

And last week TeleRead published my report on e-readers at the fair, so take a peek at that, too.

If you don’t follow me on twitter, then you missed my tweet about yesterday’s Please Explain, which was all about type and typography. Fairly basic stuff, but still fun to listen to! Thanks to Toni for sharing.