The Road by Cormac McCarthy

I've been reading some books for well over a year, sometimes 2 or even 3 years, if I am going really slowly--Guns, Germs and Steel would be one such book, which I seem to be reading at the pace of 25 pages a year. But occasionally, if I get really intense about a book, I can read it quite quickly, putting other books aside to concentrate on a particular book that I am enjoying. One such recent book was The Road by Cormac McCarthy, which I received as a part of a bundle of books given as gift from my friend, Ben.

The story is set in a post-apocalyptic America. At first, I understood that most of the world has been destroyed due to some kind of use of weapons of mass destruction, but after further reflection, it is apparent that the author never specifies what was the reason why the world became this way. In any case, McCarthy paints a truly nightmarish landscape. The world is shrouded in a perpetual penumbra, freezing, covered in grey ash which falls from the sky, and pitch black at night. Signs of the former civilisation remain, burned cities, gutted vehicles at the side of the road. The ground is littered with mummied corpses. "Hell on Earth" would be an apt way to describe McCarthy's bleak vision of the future.

It is one of the bleakest, most depressing books that I have had the "pleasure" to read. It's essentially a book in the genre of survival horror, but, due to the special bond between the father and the son, who are the protagonists of the story, it is much more than just that.

I finished it and later watched the motion picture, which was a pretty solid adaptation of the book.

Breakout Nations

Reading Breakout Nations, by Ruchir Sharma.

It concerns the author's review of various emerging market nations to assess which have the best chance of breaking out economically.

Some interesting points include:

• He considers India as only having 50/50 chance of breaking out.
• He is high on Poland and South Korea.
• He is interestingly high on Turkey, particularly because wages are still quite low there.  But it will be interesting whether he writes about it more negatively in his Epilogue (I'm only halfway through the book) in light of recent issues there, including the failed coup, the terrorism issues, the chaos of the war next door and Turkey's intervention etc.
• He argues that wealth accumulation in the hands of a few individuals suggests economic stagnation--he provides a table which shows that Malaysia has very concentrated wealth (not surprising).
• He is down on Hungary. Down on Mexico. Down on Russia.
• Interestingly, he draws a divide between whether a country will be a breakout nation and whether its stock market will do well, arguing that a country can have a good stock market, without being a breakout nation.
• Overall, he argues that, emerging market nations as a whole, will not rise and fall together, like they once did.  So picking winners will be important going forward.