My first warning about Cormac McCarthy’s The Road should have been the fact that Oprah raved about it. Every time I pick up a book that has one of her stupid book club stickers on it, I inevitably hate it. I’m not talking about the already established canonical favorites of literature nerds. I’m talking about new releases she latches onto with her trademark joie de Oprah.

But this book won not just her questionable praise. It also won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. I’ve loved several novels that can also claim such a win, including Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, which I consider one of the most perfect novels ever written. So I thought this fact might help to balance out the taint of Oprah praise.

Not so.

Perhaps it is because I love a genre that has done post-apocalyptic tales in multiple (and, dare I say it, better) ways. So the idea was not new to me. The concepts were not new. The behaviors were not new. The story was not new. The style was not new. I recognize the beauty of McCarthy’s sparse, restrained prose. But it, too, is not something new or unique to him. Book nerds will recognize in his style myriad other writers from disparate genres: Kerouac. Kesey. Carver. Sarmago.

Actually, Jos