Sunday Salon - February 3

**This is post was actually intended for last Sunday, but I didn't get a chance to finish it until today!**

Today was the first day in a long time that felt, well, relaxing. My hubby just started his two-week vacation, which we kicked off with a Sunday morning trip to our neighborhood markets at Belvedere Square for a coffee, and to stock up on milk, veggies, and meat. Maya had a very enjoyable time looking at all the colorful foods, and then falling right to sleep.

Hubby is now reading to Maya from one of my favorite chidlhood stories, The Velveteen Rabbit. Therefore, it is a rested soul that now sits down to type her Sunday Salon thoughts. Whether or not I will be able to finish this post in one sitting, is highly unlikely (**rather funny, considering I didn't finish it until a week later!), but here we go.

I started to read The Road a few days ago, which I won in Estella's Revenge October giveaway. I am starting to wish I had read it last year, when it was reviewed and discussed by many of the bloggers I know. Its premise - a post-apocalyptic America in which a father and son travel south down a road trying to survive - is heart-wrenching and difficult to read. The reader is constantly confronted by devastation and disaster, with little hope. As I sat there reading it, I wonder how I can finish such a depressing book.

Cormac McCarthy writes in a style reminescent of Nobel-winning Jose Saramago in Blindness. I wonder at his choice of punctuation, and lack of. Negative contractions are missing apostrophes: the can't, don't, wouldn't, and couldn'ts. I am still pondering on the importance of his punctuation choices to the purpose and themes of the book.