The Road - Cormack McCarthy

Or... how to keep yourself sleepless.... Not just because it is a gripping read, but because it haunted me!

"The Road" is a tale about a man and his son surviving in a post apocolyptic world, when everything is dead or dying, and everyone is scavenging what remains of food, from cans and packets, or worse, eating other people. Everything else that is usable is running out - ammunition, shoes, clothing, wood for making fires. The boy's mother features in the man's memories, but has died by the time the story starts. They meet some characters along the way, and none are what you'd call friendly.

When given something deep and/or worrisome or disturbing to think about, I am prone to insomnia. "The Road" is the first book I've read in a long time that has stuck with me so vividly, and kept me awake far, far into the night. The plots of many other books (and movies) become fuzzy soon after reading them, but the events of this book return to my brain regularly, and I read this months ago.

Why? Several reasons:

- a key plot point is never explained. You never find out what exactly happened to the world. It is kind of implied that there has been a nuclear war, but you don't know why, or how this all unfolded. It is a few years in the past when the story starts, and you just get snippets of it from the man's memories. This is plenty to wonder about.
- people driven to the edge. Resources are so scarce that you kill or be killed. Some resort to cannibalism. Some try to retain their humanity. What is humanity? It's a fine line when protecting those you love at times. What would be the point of life under these circumstances?
- parenting. All the big questions, such as how to best instill the/your key values in children? can you pass on everything that is important before you die? would you really want to have children faced with such a bleak future? Can you always find things to hope for? How do children view the world you grew up in?

These are not just questions for the grim circumstances of the book. I understand that the author, who became a parent in his 50's or 60's, and is faced with reaching old age sooner than most parents, wrote this about his own fears of not being able to pass everything important on to his son before he dies. Another part of the story is the mother's story, told through the man's memories. She is pregnant at the time the nuclear war (presumably) starts, and the boy is born soon after. She finds she can't feel optimistic at all in a post-apocalyptic world. As a woman, naturally, she has different fears.

A highly recommended read.

To see every bird on earth - Dan Koeppel

I guess this book is a memoir, as much as it is a novel, but it felt like reading a novel. It's subtitled 'A Father, a Son, and lifelong Obsession', where bird watching - and specifically bird listing is the obsession. At the time of writing, his father had seen over 7,000 birds. That's 7,000 species, not just 7,000 flappy squawky individuals. Seen and identified them, using all manner of field guides. Seen and identified them in all manner of hard to get to places. And then recorded them, meticulously, with cross referencing and reference to the official tally of species for a region. Changing the list as species are deemed to have been split or 'lumped' (as taxonimists decide that one species is actually two different ones that look pretty similar, or decide that two are really the one). To get this list his father dedicated huge chunks of time and attention to his pursuit, becoming more and more single minded about it as he grew older.

The story jumps from the past to the present, linking stories of Dan's grandparents' lives as they left Europe in war, and adapted to life in America, memories from his own childhood and his parent's marriage in it's early days, goes off on tangents about the history of bird watching, or of other famous listers, includes tales of adventure in far flung places as people hunt down birds to spot. And it does this all rather effortlessly, not a dry tedious detail book, but seeming rich with interesting stories that ebb and flow around each other. What I found most interesting was the author's own story of coming to terms with his father's reality, and the generous and philosophical way he looks at his dad's own childhood, and the pressures on him, and the joy and escape he got from watching birds (as well as the relentless family pressure to enter a career in medicine in give up any notion of being an ornithologist), and his conjecture that the repression ended up with the love of bird watching becoming an obsession. But he says it all so much more kindly and interestingly than I do. It was interesting to trace the author's own story of himself as a child and young man, and how his father and he interrelated, and to see that although there were periods of estrangement and hurt (when he wished his dad was different and more available to him) in the end he got to a point of trying to share their lives however they best could - which ends up with him with binaculors in the Amazon with his dad sharing the moment of him spotting his 7,000th bird.

It's quite interesting to look at the kind of behaviour in the book that is easy to say falls squarely outside the 'norm', and consider how these boundaries might gently blur - all the different kinds of tallies and lists that people make, all the different kinds of 'spotters' out there, as well as the garden variety tally-er (to-do, countries I've been to, books I've read, bands I've seen.. etc). Makes you wonder about (and the book explores this too) some general desire in humans to feel more in control through recording and counting, and maybe, in terms of bird watching, to feel connected to the wonderous abundance of nature. But maybe a little more the former than the latter.

If you like stories about people and what might or might not make them tick, tales of 'the life less travelled', how other people navigate their family dynamics, or you just want to appreciate birds just that little bit more, this one gets a double thumbs up.