"The Road" by Cormac McCarthy (2006)

The sky is blackened, ashes are spinning in the breeze, and civilization has disappeared. Your Uncle Bob's last barbecue? No. The remnants of Iraq in a couple of years? No. Where the world will be in several decades? Maybe. In his bestselling novel "The Road", Cormac McCarthy shows us a post-apocalyptic future so bleak that it makes the "Mad Max" trilogy look like "The Sound of Music". The survival tale follows a father and son, known only as "the man" and "the boy", across the burnt landscape in a quest for the coast and a warmer climate. Along the way, they have to deal with bone-chilling cold, bands of highway marauders with no shame, constant shortages of food, and little hope. However, the duo somehow manages to carry on through the power of love. From time to time, the father flashes back to the burning end of civilization which brought his Hell on earth to be and to the woman he loved who is no more. One would think you'd give your main characters names, but perhaps McCarthy made them anonymous to remind us that in another world this could be any father and any son. This novel didn't for the most part send chills down my spine or wrench my heart, and the fact that the author uses no quotation marks got kind of annoying, but it was an interesting read nonetheless. I never thought that I'd like anything which was, as it turns out, named an Oprah's Book Club pick, but my math teacher made a good suggestion with this piece.