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The Road

Cormac McCarthy

13 readers recommend it across 12 discussions

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THE WORD OF MOUTH

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Original Hacker News comments, in the readers’ own words.

andyjohnson0
I have a Random House audiobook version of the trilogy read by Brad Pitt. His Spanish pronunciation isn't great (although better than mine) but I enjoy his quiet voice and slightly careworn delivery. It's abridged, though, and I wanted to read the whole work. The Recorded Books recordings of The Road and No Country for Old Men narrated by Tom Stechschulte are very good too.

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cellover
I like understanding where I am located in space and time, that is why I love reading about science & science fiction ; it is indirectly related to religion in the sense that it makes you think about your world, about yourself. Buddhism / Religion / ... : - Siddartha - Hermann Hesse - The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho Science: - A brief history of time - Stephen Hawking (space, time) - The Blind Watchmaker - Richard Dawkins (evolution) - Le cerveau intime - Marc Jeannerod (in french only) Science-fiction: - The Road - Cormack Mc Carthy - City - Clifford D. Simack - Time is the simplest thing - Clifford D. Simack - Ringworld - Larry Niven
veidr
The trilogy of Neuromancer, Burning Chrome, and Mona Lisa Overdrive is still my favorite work of fiction, and also, to my mind, exemplifies the kind of taut, awesome writing that I would want to do if I wrote novels. It the only series of 3 books I have read more than once. I caught these books at just the right time in my life (age 13 or 14), leading my high-school fascination with Japan and rekindled interest in computing, and probably played an inordinately large role in me ending up as a programmer who lives in Tokyo, two decades later. I like great sci fi best, but I think most of it is crap, including virtually all of the old pulp sci fi and Asimov I grew up reading (which was basically all of it), Star Wars/Trek, etc. Other than Gibson's stuff, some of the truly spectacular sci fi I have read is the very-dense-and-not-at-all-thriller-ish Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars), and the fast-paced-and-awesome Spin by Robert Charles Wilson. That led me to read all of Wilson's books, many of which are also good. Also Haldeman is an author worth reading, though not all of his books hit their mark.…
brudgers
I recently reread Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses. I was prompted to do so by another book discussion. Not his best book - I think Blood Meridian and The Road are better - but McCarthy is a great writer. For nerd non-fiction, I just read Jim Lovell's Lost Moon which though not a great book, is a good solid book about greatness.

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SwellJoe
Try some fiction, instead. It's a vacation. I just finished The Road by Cormac McCarthy a couple of weeks ago. It's really good. That said, if you're going to read programming books, you might want narrative texts rather than "practical" books, since the practical ones require you to also have a computer, and work through the examples and such. Books like Programming Pearls, Beautiful Code, etc. tell stories about code, rather than just show you code (though there are probably moments in either book where the best course of action is to try applying what you've read about).

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