Ryan Holiday: To me, part of the road is about that thin line between civilization and chaos, the veneer between we're all in this together and every man and family for themselves.

Gilbert Cruz: I'm Gilbert Cruz, and this is the book review from The New York Times. The 100 best books of the 21st century. I've made reference many times on this show to that project, [music] which we published in summer 2024. It was this massive effort [music] where we reached out to more than 1,000 novelists and non-fiction writers, poets, [music] bookstore owners, all sorts of lovers of literature to ask what they thought were the best books of the century so far. We wanted to get an early read on what might be the great works from now that continue to resonate. We took all that data, number crunched, compiled it, and put together this list. But of course, even the most robust list of books can only tell you so much about each title. It's in talking about them, that's where the great fun lies. So today, we're going to dig in on one of those books, number 13 on the list, The Road by Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy, who died in 2023, is the author behind books as popular and traditional as No Country for Old Men and All the Pretty Horses, and as ornate and knotty as Blood Meridian. Following the success of All the Pretty Horses, he largely stayed out of the literary spotlight, spending much of his time, particularly his later years, at the Santa Fe Institute, a think tank full of scientists, physicists, and mathematicians. His legacy was complicated after his death by revelations in a Vanity Fair article. The piece detailed how he'd started a sexual relationship with a teenage girl when he was in his 40s. There's now been debate about how much she may have influenced his writing. But for The Road, which won a Pulitzer in 2007, McCarthy has said he looked to his son for inspiration. It tells the story of a man and his young boy trying to survive in a cold, gray, ash-filled post-apocalyptic United States. The book, like others by McCarthy, mixes beautiful and ornate language with gruesome and unforgettable images. He doesn't use quotation marks. Don't even talk to him about semicolons, he is not a fan. It feels both minimalist and maximalist at the same time. It's an amazing book and I wanted to talk about it with one of the people who put it on their ballot of the best books of the 21st century so far, Ryan Holiday. Ryan is the author of more than a dozen nonfiction books, many about the ancient philosophy of Stoicism. He is the host of The Daily Stoic podcast and owner of The Painted Porch Bookshop in Bastrop, Texas, just outside Austin. Ryan, thank you for being here.

Ryan Holiday: Yeah, thank you for having me.

Gilbert Cruz: Ryan, you are one of the 500 people that helped make this list. In addition to knowing you as an author, like so many people know you from your book recommendations on Instagram and on YouTube, I want to take all that experience into account and ask you as we start, what have you found is the thing that makes people return to a good novel over and over again, which I think is different from what makes people return to a piece of nonfiction that's full of information?

Ryan Holiday: I think what the great novels do is they grow with you. So, what you take out of them the first time is different than what you take out of them the second and the third and the fourth time. And I suppose there's nonfiction that this can be true for. Usually, you know, it's sort of so packed with advice that, you know, you can't get it all in one or but I I tend to find with novels, it's the richness of the writing and the characters and the complicated nature of them that you come to understand on a deeper level. You read the Odyssey and on some level it's about a guy getting home. Then you get older and you go, "Oh, this is actually a guy who's less trying to get home, but is sort of condemned to always be moving and and doing." And you see him perhaps more as a tragic figure. And so I think the great novels, they work on both like a superficial level, like it's entertaining and exciting and relatable the first time, but then as you read and reread and reread, you get something else. Gatsby's obviously a great example of this. On on one level, it's a perfect snapshot of the Jazz Age. And then you realize on a different level it's about the American dream, it's about ambition, it's about corruption, it's about materialism, it's it's about all these other themes. And and perhaps you're not equipped to get all of them when you read them in high school, but as you get older, it reveals more and more of itself to you.

Gilbert Cruz: I think that's a useful way of putting it. I've experienced this, of course. A a great book can grow with you as you grow and as you get older. If we're going to talk about The Road, I think it would be useful to quickly recap it here for anyone who hasn't had a chance to read it yet or hasn't read it in a while. So, the book begins with a father and a son. We never learn their names. And they're trying to make their way across the US in the wake of some kind of cataclysmic disaster. We never learn what exactly happened. Was it a meteor? Was it a nuclear They're pushing a shopping cart with everything that they own in it and they're trying to get to the coast, a little bit down south where they think they're going to be safer or at least warmer. Along the way, they are near starvation several times. They're surviving on scraps and they're having to hide out and keep watch because one of the biggest dangers on the road is other people. It is said many times in the book that some of their fellow survivors on Earth have turned to cannibalism. So, they want to stay clear of those people. Overall, it's this story of a father, a dad really trying to do everything he can to keep his son alive while knowing deep down inside that it might not actually be enough. So, I want to talk about how that story, again, very bleak, very apocalyptic, uh has grown with you, Ryan. I want to dig into the first time that you read it. You said that you picked it up as a college sophomore.

Ryan Holiday: Mhm.

Gilbert Cruz: And were you a big reader of fiction then? Like, what

Ryan Holiday: I I don't know. I don't think I was a big reader of fiction except for, you know, the kinds of books that you would be assigned in school. I don't think I knew that there was books like this out there. I didn't I don't know if I knew about All the Pretty Horses or Blood Meridian yet.

Gilbert Cruz: Mhm.

Ryan Holiday: But, uh I would I was much more a non-fiction reader at that point in my life.

Gilbert Cruz: Yeah. You're in college, you're figuring stuff out, you're imagining the whole world is ahead of you. Your whole life is ahead of you.

Ryan Holiday: Yes.

Gilbert Cruz: And you pick up this book, which is like, actually, maybe maybe not. Maybe the world can end at any point. How did you feel when you read this for the first time?

Ryan Holiday: Yeah, I mean, it's dark and depressing and alarming. I think I was struck by the beauty of the writing, the sparseness of it. I do remember right around that time seeing the movie Children of Men, which was another It's based on a novel as well, but another sort of similarly apocalyptic work. So, that was probably coloring my experience, but I just remember thinking, "Wow, this is really cool. I should read this guy's other stuff." But, being a sophomore in college or or thereabouts, you know, I don't have kids, I'm not married. I guess it's a testament to how good the book is that it can still be read and experienced even if you really can't even conceive of the central sort of relationship driving the book.

Gilbert Cruz: Sure. On that first read, were there moments that stood out to you that you remembered? I had not read this book since it came out in 2006. So, it's it's celebrating its 20th anniversary. And I still remember the moment with the Coke, which happens 25 pages in. The father and son come by an old soda machine, and the father, he finds a Coca-Cola, and he gives it to his son, who has no idea what it is. He's never seen it. He's never tasted it. He says it's bubbly. It's sort of surprising to him. The man, of course, is very familiar with Coke, one of the great drinks in modern existence. And it's just a nice little moment. And that has stuck with me all these years.

Ryan Holiday: The thing I took most out of the book was the image of carrying the fire. I took that as the central message of the book, that there is this kind of goodness, morality, earnestness that we have in us, an innateness, that the job of both the parent and the person surviving in a fallen, broken, you know, evil world is to keep that fire alive, to carry it. And I think that was what I was most struck by. And I remember a few years later, I bought or someone gave me a Zippo lighter that just said carry the fire on it. And it sits on my desk. And and so, I've I've always loved that. Um and you know what I think has struck me about it, you know, reading other Cormac McCarthy books later, is there's a level of hopefulness and positivity and goodness there that is not uh so much a theme in many of his other books, which are so dark and so scathing of sort of human nature and human society. There's something uh much sweeter about the road than any anything else he writes.

Gilbert Cruz: It's amazing to hear you use the word sweet in relation to this book for perhaps obvious reasons. It's a very dark book. But I think you're right, as we'll probably discuss, where it ends up is to my surprise, a place of hope at the end. I'm imagining you a young man in college thinking about the fire, thinking about goodness, morality, what it means to be a person. I'm trying to remember how I was at that age. Just like I'm just try to get through. Maybe I'm being a little crazier than I would have been at home. I'm not thinking about being a person in the world that way.

Ryan Holiday: I guess I was. I mean, that's what I think drew me to to literature and philosophy, especially at that time in my life, was that very genuine interest in meaning and purpose and morality. I think I was drawn to that in fiction and in non-fiction because um I don't know. I just wanted I wanted my fix, which I do think the best the best art does is it it gives us not to put it to to quarterly. Like it helps us carry the fire. Like we see in these stories and statues and paintings and mosaics and myths, like something about that higher calling or higher capacity in it inspires in us maybe fleeting examples of that in our own behavior.

Gilbert Cruz: It is a book in which, perhaps for obvious reasons, it's a post-apocalyptic world. Most people have died violently. God is absent largely. But the man makes scant reference to it. You know, at least in the idea that the whatever the God is, there's something there that he talks to a couple of times in the book. But also early on in the book, he looks at his child and he says, uh then he just sat there holding the binoculars and watching the ashen daylight congeal over the land. He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said, "If he is not the word of God, God never spoke." And there is a sense of meaning and that meaning is in this other person that he is responsible for.

Ryan Holiday: Yeah, I I marked I marked that passage also. I I I was very

Gilbert Cruz: man, luckily.

Ryan Holiday: I was very very struck by that. Yeah, there there is a a purity and a holiness in a young child that I do think we're obligated to protect and shepherd into its existence. And that that's kind of what I thought he meant by carrying the fire. Like this is this thing that you've been given. Don't let it go out.

Gilbert Cruz: I was struck by that passage, but also by so many other passages. He writes like no one I've ever read. The The sense of rhythm, the word choice, half of the words that I'd never seen before, I was convinced he made up and then I looked up the words. I was like, "No, this is a real word. You just don't have Cormac McCarthy's vocabulary." There is a moments if if you mind me reading this. It's not particularly

Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

Gilbert Cruz: notable for what happens, but there's just the rhythm of his prose in this book is out of sight. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a seafloor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them as silently as eyes. He is doing something with rhythm here and pacing and word choice and imagery that I remember as a person in their 20s when I read this the first time. Even then I was like, I this is elite. Like I don't know how to how to get over this.

Ryan Holiday: Yeah, I think there's two things. So, one I kind of have this pet theory that there are certain authors or books where everything they'd done up until that point was leading them to this sort of perfect moment. Like I think Michael Lewis wrote a half dozen or a dozen sort of finance character driven books and then the great financial crisis happened and he was the perfect person to explain that thing. And everything that Cormac McCarthy wrote and went through and his weird world view and whatever, all of his work his thousands and thousands of hours his craft as a writer is all leading up to that. Then the other thing I noticed is it has more of a Mad Max element that that I think I missed on on the first couple readings.

Gilbert Cruz: Sure. There is a and he only speckles this throughout but the the appearances of this element are very notable. You know, he talks about sort of the blood cults and the marauders and all this stuff and and and other author would have made that the central source of tension. But McCarthy doesn't do that. He makes this story about the core relationship between the man and his son. He didn't do many interviews but he actually did a rare interview in 2007 when Oprah picked the book for her book club. He appeared on her show and he told her that the inspiration for the road came during a 2003 visit to El Paso. He went to El Paso with his young son John. His son was asleep and McCarthy looked out the hotel window and imagined what that town might look like in 50 100 years. He says he imagined fires on a distant hill and he thought about his son and what it would be like for son to live in that terrible world. He didn't write the book until years later but clearly that was the moment he dedicates The Road not surprisingly to his son. This is all relevant to the next time that you picked up The Road.

Gilbert Cruz: Tell me about it.

Ryan Holiday: Yeah, I don't know what I was thinking, but I decided to reread The Road, not just after I had kids, but in in the early days of the pandemic. Um

Gilbert Cruz: Perfect.

Ryan Holiday: Yeah, I It's funny because I I couldn't bring myself to read Camus' The Plague, but I did decide to pick up The Road, and I remember zipping through it. I finished it. I just put my oldest son to bed. He would have been three and a half, maybe four. And as I I finished, my wife was still putting our our our baby down, and I'm just looking around this empty house. It's dark. We live out in the country in Texas. And I was like, I can't be by myself. And I I went into his room, and I just broke down and wept. Because, you know, it it it the road captures both the beauty and the horror of being a parent. That this incredible bond, you know, it's been said like your kid is your heart running around outside your body. That was a difficult moment in time. Obviously, now we know how the story ends. But we didn't necessarily in those early days of the of the pandemic. And I think I felt all that very acutely. And it's interesting to me to hear that the book was somewhat inspired by a by a sleeping child. There is there is something about that, too, that is um you know, if you're you're just always going as a parent, but when you slow down and you see them sleeping there at peace, it it's impossible not to be moved by it.

Gilbert Cruz: What was it about that moment or that rereading that led you to this idea, I I need to be near my child, or I cannot be alone at this particular moment?

Ryan Holiday: I mean, I think it's just the the very realness of the idea that the world is falling apart, that you have essentially no ability to protect or shield them from this thing that is happening. And one of the moving scenes in in The Road is a flashback where his son is being born. And you know, his his wife is pregnant and there's like thunderclouds and he just senses that that I think the power goes out and it's the first sign that things are about to go wrong, right? This sort of impending doom. That is kind of the feeling that I remember from some of those early days of the pandemic, the presidential address, the news, the everyday more reports, the case count. There was a possibility of it going the way that it went in this book. And so I think that's the feeling that I had there, the the the thin line to me part of The Road is about that thin line between civilization and chaos, the veneer between we're all in this together and every man and family for themselves.

Gilbert Cruz: I I absolutely agree.

Ryan Holiday: Yeah. And and great literature, you know, is is a mirror. It gets you to reflect on your situation as much as what's happening to the characters.

Gilbert Cruz: Yeah, one moment that deals with parenting at the end of the world after all order has broken down um that uh that that really stuck with me is there's this moment when a stranger grabs a hold of the son and the father has to make a decision. He has a gun and it only has two bullets in it and he uses it in that moment to kill this bad guy. And afterwards um McCarthy writes, "This is my child," he said. "I washed a dead man's brains out of his hair. That is my child." Then he wrapped him in the blanket and carried him to the fire. Obviously, this is an extreme example of parenthood. Uh few of us have to do this, but at the same time that metaphorically is what it sometimes means to be a parent, which is you have to do the tough things for your child. You have to do that over and over again.

Ryan Holiday: I I was struck by that scene, too. And then what the stakes of that scene mean is that having lost uh one of the bullets, he now faces a day-to-day reality where his insurance policy, like, "Well, I could always kill him and myself before something horrible happens." Those two bullets in the gun are representative of that. And so to have to use that bullet there to save his son creates this profound tension in the rest of the book, which is every exchange he's now having to think about his inability to save him and his son from potentially heinous unlivable torture.

Gilbert Cruz: Yeah, after that there are several bracing scenes in the book where he gives the child the pistol. And he's basically like, "You know what to do. I have to go do this thing. Stay here. If someone comes, you have to put this gun in your mouth." And it is so I'm not going to curse on this, but it is it is terrible. But it also, on a deeper level, it gets this conversation that he has with his wife in these brief flashbacks. There are only a couple near the beginning of the book, which is she says, "This is a horror movie. We're the walking dead. Like, we Maybe it's better for us not to be here anymore. Maybe we should just end this now and not have to deal with the horror of whatever comes next." She eventually makes that decision for herself. And the man is constantly fighting against that despair and that idea that yes, we we could both easily take our lives tonight and that would be the end, and it would save us from all this suffering that we are experiencing. But as he says near the end of the book, the man is fading, he's dying. His son asks him, "What's the bravest thing you ever did?" And the man says, after he spits blood into the road, "Getting up this morning." And it is the idea that every day that I have gotten up after all this terrible stuff has happened, and every day that you get up, and every day that the two of us walk on this road together, we are doing the bravest thing that has ever been done.

Ryan Holiday: I would say the one flaw of the book that I experienced rereading it now is the character of the wife. I remembered her as not having the stomach for the the Walking Dead horror show that was their lives. I guess I didn't pick up on the earlier reads. I took it to mean that she basically rejects the child from birth, that she doesn't want to hold it right after it's born, that there's something about who she is or what she is going through that that makes her not want to have anything to do with the kid. It felt very one-dimensional. I I felt like she could have been more well-rounded, and that her as a plot device, which is that she was there and then wasn't there, could have been rendered in a way that doesn't make her fundamentally un-maternal and the father sort of a superhero. So I I did that did ring less realistic or meaningful to me in this other reading. I don't know what you thought.

Gilbert Cruz: I I agree, and I think it was a it's a critique that has followed McCarthy his entire career, or as long as people were paying attention to his career. You know, you can't write female characters, you're not very good at representing. At the same time, however, one of the things that he does do well, I think, is hit over and over again in this book the the ways in which the decisions that a parent has to make, as you said, sort of resonate whether you're walking your kids to school, cleaning them up after they fall off the jungle gym, or you're in a post-apocalypse. I mean, you you I know think this is a particularly interesting book in the context of thinking about parenting.

Ryan Holiday: Yeah, I I like to call it a parenting book in disguise. Like I think a lot of men especially maybe aren't going to sit down and read a parenting book, but there's a lot of parenting lessons in here. Just even your your point about like the bravest thing you can do is just get up and keep going. There's a a part in the book where he's talks about just trying to tell his kids stories, like stories of virtue and just things to instill him with hope and and values. Obviously, you know, this connects back to the idea of carrying the fire. [snorts] I think that's a really important part about being a parent and something that's fundamentally missing in both a lot of children's literature these days and in adult literature. Like where are the heroic figures? Like if if if anything, the literature is like about parents making the selfish choice. You know, I just reread Revolutionary Road. You have the the sort of struggle with the obligations and the unfairness and the dysfunctions of parenting in modern society, but not a lot that sort of gives you a sense of like being part of this kind of sacred like that yeah, your kid is this warrant and that that warrant has a kind of holiness or sacredness to it.

Gilbert Cruz: Right, and I feel like you're leading right into something I wanted to ask a bunch about, which is not only about your relationship to this book as a parent, but your relationship to this book as someone who practices and encourages other to to consider practicing the philosophy of stoicism, which is focused on there are a bunch of tenets, bunch of virtues. I feel like a bunch of that stuff is in here, whether Cormac McCarthy intended it or not. And I'm wondering as someone who thinks about that all the time and has thought about that for years and has written several books about it, how you see those two things coming together in this work.

Ryan Holiday: Yeah, I think there's a a lowercase stoicism to The Road and then at different times some uppercase stoicism as far as the virtues and the values. There's the sort of toughness and the resiliency and the you know, the bravest thing I did was get up this morning, but there's also the idea of like, hey, look, we don't eat people. I know that seems like a pretty low bar, but like the rest of the world has um has descended into barbarism, but we have chosen not to. Um the rest of the world might steal, the rest of the world might hurt, might use people for its own survival, but we're not going to do that. And we're not going to do that because we're the good guys, as the child so earnestly says. And you can see this kind of interplay between the father and the and the son where it's like every time the father has to make a vexing moral choice or has to protect them or they have to, you know, do something that in a civilized society would be wrong, like raiding someone else's house, the child goes, "But we're still the good guys, right? How how are we the good guys?" And And again, I feel like that our primary job as parents is obviously to keep our kids literally safe and alive and then the next most urgent thing is raising them to be one of the good guys.

Gilbert Cruz: There's a moment near the end. The man is not doing so well and he says, "Every day is a lie, but you are dying. That is not a lie." And I know you like to say memento mori. right there. I I took my child once to The Cloisters, which is a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art that is in Upper Manhattan and they have a bunch of medieval art there. And there's a mirror and etched on on mirror is essentially, "Remember you will die." Yeah. My child is probably 10, 9 when I showed this to him. Maybe not the best parenting decision. I was like, this is something you should remember. Then I tried to explain it to him and I failed and that's part of parenting, too. But yeah, memento mori.

Ryan Holiday: Yeah, that that that we are mortal, we don't get to decide when we go, how we go. There's a passage in Meditations where Marcus Aurelius is quoting Epictetus and I think pertains here to the road where he talks about as you tuck your child in at night, he says you should say to yourself they might not make it till the morning. Mhm. And when he does this philosophical practice, I do not think he is detaching in advance. I think he's he's reminding himself that tomorrow is not for certain. That every day is a lie, no day is certain. We are all dying every day, the Stoics would say. And so to take moments for granted, to take people for granted, to put things off is arrogant and reckless, I think.

Gilbert Cruz: Can I quote something else from the book? It's just It's hitting right on what you're saying. There's a moment where McCarthy writes, "People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn't even know they were there."

Ryan Holiday: Yeah. There is something about we're always rejecting this kind of present moment either either in anxiety of the future, like what if this terrible thing could happen, or we're neglecting the present because we're just assuming the future will be better. And you do this as a parent a lot, you know, like can't wait till they walk, I can't wait till they go off to school, I can't wait till they drive, I can't wait to and then inevitably you will get to that benchmark and wish to be back where you are right now. And so how long do you get to do this? How long do any of us have? Does the world have? I think these are some of the haunting themes there of of the book for sure.

Gilbert Cruz: When we come back, Ryan Holiday explains why The Road was the only novel he selected for his list of the 10 best books of the 21st century. [music] The Road was the only novel you picked when we asked you to pick 10 books from the 21st century. You picked nine non-fiction books and The Road. And I just want to hear a little bit more about that.

Ryan Holiday: That's funny. I don't remember all of the all of the the books on the list. I I do tend to find that most modern fiction is disappointing. And I think what I was struck by, you know, rereading The Road, is how much it felt like a book not published in this time. Like if you told me the publication date was 1971 or 1941, I'd probably buy most of it. Like uh I mean, certainly there's not much in the way of technology that that dates the book one way or another. But it does have the feel of a novel that's been with us a lot longer than 20 years. I sometimes talk about like uh I don't believe that Free Fallin by Tom Petty was written in 1989. It's much older than that. And uh The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down is obviously a song from the Civil War, right? Like it could not have been written as recently as it was. And very rarely do I have the experience where I read something new and I feel like this has been around forever. And that's the feeling that I get reading The Road.

Gilbert Cruz: It's a great feeling. I would like to close out by asking you if you had some thematic recommendations.

Ryan Holiday: I got them.

Gilbert Cruz: Okay. So, first, Father's Day is here. Give me a couple books that you think people should buy for the dads in their life.

Ryan Holiday: Uh I thought some parenting books generally that I thought people would love if you were struck by The Road as a kind of a a parenting book, Of Boys and Men by Richard Reeves about the sort of male uh crisis, uh why young men are struggling. There is something about sort of traditional masculinity that Cormac McCarthy embraces, I think, in most of his books that I I do think is positive in the sense that it it can inspire men to to to be the best of themselves. So, I thought that book was relevant. Um we're talking about the sort of practical independence, craftiness, uh survivability skills. Uh Steve Rinella, he wrote a a parenting book called Outdoor Kids in an Inside World that I've been raving about. And um one of my favorite lines in the book, he says like, you want to raise kids that don't say "Ew" a lot. You want kids who who'd be able to survive the world if something fell apart. On a little more literary front, I think more people should read this. This is Kafka's Letter to the Father, which is this confessional, heartbreaking, tragic letter uh that that that Kafka writes to his father who he was uh never really a fit with, never really got him, and his father never really got his son. Um there's something very beautiful and vulnerable about this book. I've always loved that. I've said that just as The Road is a parenting book in disguise, I think David Epstein's Range is a parenting book in disguise.

Gilbert Cruz: Mhm.

Ryan Holiday: athletes primarily being generalists or specialists, and it contrasts Roger Federer and Tiger Woods.

Gilbert Cruz: Oh, wow.

Ryan Holiday: But you can't talk about Tiger Woods and not think of it and that specialization from the lens of choices that his parents made very early.

Gilbert Cruz: Mhm.

Ryan Holiday: And um I I I don't know. I I I talk about this book a lot with sports parents, but any parent who's trying to figure out, you know, especially in this world of AI, do you make do you do you try to get them really good at one thing, or is actually that the the ultimate vulnerability in a world of disruption and change? And then, um we're talking about keeping the fire and being the good guys. Uh Dr. Becky's Good Inside is a book I've given to a lot of dads and and parents across the board. You know, our point is just remembering like your kid is good inside. Like, they were born good, they are good, they are trying their best, they are not trying to hurt you or drive you insane or kill you or all the things it can sometimes feel like. And when you start from this premise, you know, it makes some of the things that we do and say and think about as a parent, you know, so obviously counterproductive. So, I thought this was a a really sweet and and wonderful wonderful book that I I really love.

Gilbert Cruz: Those are I haven't read any of those. Those are all great recommendations. I'm going to take them with me.

Ryan Holiday: Okay.

Gilbert Cruz: Again, you recommend books all the time, you own a bookstore. Imagine a person comes into the Painted Porch, says, "I just finished The Road, knocked my socks off. What should I read that's sort of like The Road, or what should I read next?"

Ryan Holiday: Okay, so The Road was an Oprah Book Club pick, and it was popular when it came out. Uh Reese Witherspoon's Book Club picked Wild Dark Shores about a year ago. And this is a book about a family in the midst of a world being destroyed by climate change that is keeping seeds in a seed library on an island off the coast of Antarctica. The walls of it are caving in, the world is is is basically ending, all slightly less apocalyptically and violently as The Road. And then, all of a sudden, a woman washes up on shore alive. Mystery ensues, but a book that reminded me of The Road in that it's got some some parenting lessons. It's a single father on the on the island again. So, similar thing. Have you read Death Be Not Proud by John Gunther?

Gilbert Cruz: Mhm.

Ryan Holiday: Ah, okay. Will also make you break down and weep. John Gunther, one of the most famous journalists in America in the middle of the 20th century. His son, this precocious brilliant kid on his way to Harvard at like 16 or 17, gets diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor. And it is a book about his son fighting for his life. That same fire that you see in the son in the road, you see in this kid. And you see him trying to keep it alive. His parents keep it alive. It is a beautiful beautiful book. I was very moved by that. And then if you like the survivalist elements of The Road, the sort of journey element of it and the implacable sort of human spirit, the inability to quit or be killed, I thought The Revenant, which is also a good movie, is a very good one. Based on a true story about a man mauled by a grizzly bear, left to die by his two companions. And he undertakes a several hundred mile journey of survival so he can enact his revenge on them. It is a riveting novel.

Gilbert Cruz: And he comes out looking like Leonardo DiCaprio.

Ryan Holiday: Yes, exactly.

Gilbert Cruz: impressive feat that has ever been accomplished. Yes. Ryan Holiday, thank you so much for joining The Book Review to talk about Cormac McCarthy's The Road, one of the New York Times' 100 Best Books of the 21st century. It was such a good conversation.

Ryan Holiday: Oh man, I had so much fun.

Gilbert Cruz: I hope one day to visit your store. I really do.

Ryan Holiday: I'll I'll see you out here. Come out anytime.

Gilbert Cruz: All right. Have a great weekend.

Ryan Holiday: All right. Bye.

Gilbert Cruz: [music] The Book Review is produced by Sarah Diamond, Amy Pearl, and Patrizia Subaran. [music] It's edited by Tracy Mumford and mixed this week by Aviva Shapiro. Original music by Dan Powell and Alicia Etop. Special thanks to Dalia Haddad. [music] We want to hear what you think about the show. So, send us an email at the bookreview@nytimes.com. [music] I'm Gilbert Cruz. Thanks for listening.