30 Day Book Challenge: Day Fourteen

So Many Books, So Little Time is hosting the 30 Day Book Challenge. Each day for 30 days I'll be answering one question about books.

Day Fourteen: An author of a book you just don't get

During the month of March, I read The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Here's the link to my review.

I understood the book just fine. What I couldn't "get" was why it was so popular and why people thought it was so great. If you read the review then you'll get a more in-depth discussion of why I disliked this book so much, but for today's post I'm just going to say that I found this book to be insanely boring. The dialogue was repetitive, the characters weren't developed, and the whole time I was reading it all I could think was that McCarthy didn't really want to write this novel and was doing the absolute minimum required of him. It was almost as if he was sitting at his computer going:

All right, I've got characters. Do they need names? Nah, I won't give them names. 


Should they really do anything during the novel? No, I'm too lazy for that so they'll just walk for a bazillion miles. 


Now, should there be a plot? Hmm...I don't really feel like developing one. Let's just have some sort of "goal" for them to reach. People will buy that. 


So, I know that I want this to be a post-apocalyptic novel but I'm not up to doing a back story so let's just make it ambivalent. 


Let me check something...Okay, so my publisher wants there to be dialogue. I'll just have them say the same three sentences the entire novel. Oh, and I'm not going to use quotation marks. Or "he said." Or anything that a novel's really supposed to have. 


The book is done now but it's a little short...I know! I'll just add a few more pages of walking, non-dialogue, and ambivalence. People will think it's genius, I'll get a paycheck, and no one will have to know that I was writing this at gunpoint. 


Yeah, I'm almost positive that's what he was thinking.

-Gabe