The Road is Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-​​winning 2006 novel about a man and his son sur­viv­ing in a post-​​apocalyptic dystopia. A spare, nerve-​​wracking, often fright­en­ing tale, it’s the sort of book you can’t put down but want to, lest the images invade your night­mares. But in the end, though the plot is relent­lessly bleak, McCarthy is telling a valu­able story about the power of moral stead­fast­ness in the face of dan­ger and starvation.

I didn’t choose to read The Road. That is, some­one else in my book club chose it, and I went along with the choice because That’s What You Do in Book Club. McCarthy has a rep­u­ta­tion for grip­ping, vio­lent works, not nor­mally Yours Truly’s cup of tea. (He wrote No Country for Old Men, the book that inspired the 2007 movie—I haven’t par­taken of either of those.) I warned my fel­low book-​​clubbers that I was liable to stop the book if it got too gory. I was ready to stop halfway. But after I looked up the syn­op­sis on Wikipedia, I was sat­is­fied that I wouldn’t totally hate the rest of the book, so I fin­ished it, and I’m glad I did.

The novel’s name­less pro­tag­o­nists jour­ney along a road in an unrec­og­niz­able America where noth­ing lives or grows. Nothing, that is, except for the humans who can get to the dwin­dling food stores left behind in aban­doned homes and the occa­sional fall­out shel­ter. And the heinous gangs of brig­ands who sur­vive through cannibalism.

One reviewer believed that The Road was “the most impor­tant envi­ron­men­tal book ever,” because its bleak vision of the future could stir read­ers to avoid eco­log­i­cal holo­caust. That’s good and well, and per­haps even true, but to me it misses the point. The ashen set­ting that McCarthy so aptly por­trayed is just that, a set­ting. The man and boy’s resolve to sur­vive, and to sur­vive with­out eat­ing other humans—the barest min­i­mum of civ­i­liza­tion, and prob­a­bly the most essen­tial instance of the golden rule—are more pow­er­ful “teach­ing moments.” In his review, Ron Charles sug­gested that, despite a McCarthy’s weak­ness in depict­ing women (“Most middle-​​school boys have a more nuanced under­stand­ing of the oppo­site sex than McCarthy demon­strates in his fic­tion, and he does noth­ing to alter that impres­sion here.”), the novel’s lessons about “innate good­ness” and the “sim­ple beauty of this hero’s love for his son” are “profound.”

I agree. The book engaged me and pro­voked deep thoughts about liv­ing in extremis. Is sur­vival worth­while when the world is bar­ren and most evey­one you meet is a sav­age bar­bar­ians? Are any prin­ci­ples bind­ing when sur­vival is on the line? Do prin­ci­ples mat­ter when there is no soci­ety to speak of? McCarthy implies his own answers to these ques­tions through the pro­tag­o­nists, while show­ing that the cal­cu­lus of prin­ci­pled sur­vival can be harsh and unpleas­ant. If you have a strong-​​enough stom­ach for that sort of book, I rec­om­mend The Road.

Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice is so ubiq­ui­tous that I thought it would be famil­iar and unsur­pris­ing. After all, my sis­ters tor­tured me through one junior-​​high sum­mer with repeated view­ings of the BBC minis­eries, and I saw the 2005 Keira Knightley film in the the­ater.  But after read­ing the actual text I can repeat that trite dic­tum: the book was better.

Because you’ve prob­a­bly already been acquainted with P&P, there’s no need to dilly dally by sum­ming up the plot. (If you don’t know who Lizzy and Mr. Darcy are, you’re either a sis­ter­less guy or a romanti-​​phobic gal, and you should check out Wikipedia.) Instead, I want to focus on Austen’s writ­ing: deft and witty. Her prose is tight and her dia­logue is engag­ing. As one might expect, she uses cadences and words that are a touch for­eign to the mod­ern ear, but the words and descrip­tions are so clear that the for­eign “accent” becomes familiar.

A few sam­ples from the book—

Mr. Darcy explain­ing his views on char­ac­ter defects to Lizzy:

“There is, I believe, in every dis­po­si­tion a ten­dency to some par­tic­u­lar evil—a nat­ural defect, which not even the best edu­ca­tion can overcome.”

“And your defect is to hate every body.”

“And yours,” he replied with a smile, “is will­fully to mis­un­der­stand them.”

Mr. Bennet dis­cussing the snivel­ing Mr. Collins’ mar­riage pro­posal with Lizzy and his wife:

“I under­stand that Mr. Collins has made you an offer of mar­riage. Is it true?” Elizabeth replied that it was. “Very well—and this offer of mar­riage you have refused?”

“I have, sir.”

“Very well. We now come to the point. Your mother insists upon your accept­ing it. Is it not so, Mrs. Bennet?”

“Yes, or I will never see her again.”

“An unhappy alter­na­tive is before you, Elizabeth. From this day, you must be a stranger to one of your par­ents. Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do.”

And, of course, the famous open­ing line:

It is a truth uni­ver­sally acknowl­edged, that a sin­gle man in pos­ses­sion of a good for­tune, must be in want of a wife.

Which reminds me: one must be care­ful read­ing Austen. A mod­ern reader might be tempted pass on her, per­haps con­sid­er­ing her an out­moded tra­di­tion­al­ist. But that famous open­ing line is imbued with the tren­chant, cut­ting cul­tural crit­i­cism that fills the novel. Austen eval­u­ates her char­ac­ters hon­estly, and so she skew­ers many them in a way that pre­fig­ures 20th-​​century crit­i­cism of “tra­di­tional” fam­ily roles. Lizzy’s sis­ters do not sim­ply want to be mar­ried, they are mar­riage hun­gry. Her father is a well-​​meaning but reclu­sive and neglect­ful man, one who is very nearly emo­tion­ally absent toward his fam­ily. And the upper class are not always afforded the dig­nity that they think they deserve.

I was sur­prised and thrilled by how much I enjoyed Pride & Prejudice, and by how famil­iar it was, though set in the early 19th century.

Nicholson Baker’s first book, The Mezzanine (1988), is a decep­tively small book. As a mem­ber of my book club noted, phys­i­cally, it con­tains more words than the spine’s width would sug­gest, because nearly a third of the book’s text is found in the foot­notes. The “plot” of the book con­sists entirely of one man’s thoughts at the end of his lunch hour as he approaches–and then rides up–an esca­la­tor up to the mez­za­nine in his office. Too, the sub­jects of the narrator’s thoughts in the book appear imma­te­r­ial on first read­ing. But, through the nar­ra­tor, Baker plumbs these mun­dane top­ics to rarely-​​seen depths. With incred­i­ble atten­tion to detail, Baker crafts a book that both amuses and enlightens.

Howie (the nar­ra­tor) thinks about much the same things that most peo­ple do. Most peo­ple don’t talk about these sub­jects, though, because they seem so small. One chap­ter dwells heav­ily on cor­po­rate bath­rooms. Considering the slightly odd fact that one is gen­er­ally paid for using the bath­room, Howie expounds:

[T]he stop at the men’s room was of a piece with the morning’s work, a chore like the other busi­ness chores I was respon­si­ble for, and there­fore, though it obvi­ously didn’t help the com­pany to make more money, it was part of my job . . . . What that meant was that my com­pany was as a rule pay­ing me to make six vis­its a day to the men’s room–three in the morn­ing, and three in the after­noon: my work was bounded and seg­mented by stops in this tiled decom­pres­sion cham­ber, in which I adjusted my tie, made sure that my shirt was tucked in, cleared my throat, washed the newsprint from my hands, and uri­nated onto a cake of straw­berry deodor­ant rest­ing in one of four wall-​​mounted porce­lain gargoyles.

Howie gives long shrift to many such top­ics, includ­ing pop­corn (and its Jiffy Pop incar­na­tion), vend­ing machines, straws, bags, foot­notes, and shoelaces. Shoelaces, in fact, are some­thing of the novel’s theme, since one of Howie’s tasks on lunch hour was pur­chas­ing a pair to replace the two that broke within a day of each other. The serendipity–or not–of the two shoelaces snap­ping so near in time occu­pies much of the book.

In exam­in­ing the minu­tiae of life so closely, Baker lux­u­ri­ates in the thoughts that most peo­ple would sim­ply leave as half thoughts. Gracefully fol­low­ing those thoughts to their log­i­cal con­clu­sions allows Baker to paint a remark­able por­trait of mod­ern life, full of beauty, com­plex­ity, and serendip­ity. His por­trait is both famil­iar and strange; famil­iar because it is so sim­i­lar to the half-​​thoughts we all have, and strange because it is so fully formed.

After read­ing this book, one can’t help but appre­ci­ate more of the  previously-​​ignored details of quo­tid­ian life.