Finished: The Road (McCarthy). A bleak book about a father and young son trying to survive in the post-apocalyptic world. The father and son just go by "the man" and "the boy", and they are a couple of the lone survivors of some event that appeared to wipe out most of civilization. The boy was actually born right about the time it happened, so sadly, this is the only life and world he's ever known....one covered in gray ash...that rains gray ash, whose rivers are gray ash. The man and the boy travel down the road with their few possessions, trying to make it south towards the ocean since they are freezing where they are. They are constantly afraid of gangs of other survivors who have taken to enslaving people and/or eating them! The man spends the entire time coughing up blood, so you know that he probably will not survive to the end of the book. The boy has a goodness in him that comes with the innocence of youth. He wants to help every person they see when they are starving themselves. Eventually they make it to the coast, but the ocean isn't blue like the boy had hoped. The father doesn't survive much longer, but he tells the boy he must go on and try to find "the good guys" and keep "carrying the fire". After his father dies, a man who appears to be one of the good guys comes to take the boy to go with his wife, his son and his daughter. That's where the book ends. No message of hope or anything in this book. Nope...just a few hundred pages of desolation, despair, lost dreams, and oh yeah, the mother who commits suicide early on (before the story begins) because she can't handle things. The Road is a Pulitzer Prize winning book, and it's true that I couldn't put it down. I just had a glimmer of hope that things might get better. It's pretty scary to read in detail how things could be if most of the human population were obliterated. ok, on to a happier book next I hope!