Slacks for Ella Funt

I’ve been meaning to read The Road for a long time. I enjoyed McCarthy’s Border trilogy, but sometimes I find him to be a bit of a slog. And honestly, I just rarely find myself in the mood to read something bleak and apocalyptic. But after reading Life As We Knew It, I kind of was in an apocalypse mood.
The Road has a lot of similarities to other McCarthy books. Journeys that never seem to end. Food that is rare—just some beans and a tortilla every few days in the Border trilogy, the rare scavenged can in The Road. And carnage. Lots of carnage and brutality. I would say that The Road has more numerous and grotesque images of carnage than anything I’ve ever read.
Intense as the book is, I never felt like I got fully sucked in. McCarthy has grabbed me in the past, particularly in the long sequence with Billy and the wolf in the opening of The Crossing. But with The Road, I always felt like I was holding it at arm’s length, perhaps because it was so bleak, it felt too unreal.
I keep meaning to look online for Oprah’s interview with McCarthy when she picked The Road for her book club. I just can’t fathom the reclusive McCarthy sitting down on Oprah’s couch to describe his vision of bleak annihilation.