Cold Mountain

I had high hopes for this book considering I had heard nothing but good things about it. However, my hopes were immediately dashed. There were just so many uninteresting characters who added very little to the story. Inman is so boring I found my mind wondering during many of his chapters. The Ada chapters are the most interesting in the book. Ruby is a bad ass and I'm 100% here for her!!!! The problem with the Ada chapters are that we don't spend nearly enough time with them. Just when things are getting interesting with Ada and Ruby, Inman is forced back on us. But this is a man's world/book so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

The audiobook needs to be re-recorded. It's terrible. You can hear every jump cut. Some parts are louder than others. And the chapter titles all sound different from the rest of the book. I got this book on Audible and listened to it at 1.25x. Frazier's reading was too slow at 1.0x.

Lyrical, literary, engrossing, violent, redemptive (-ish), thought-provoking, a paean to nature and the hopeful/hopeless state of human community. The kind of book that keeps you pondering it after you finish, both for its portrait of human society, but also to unpick the literary sleight-of-hand that went into its construction.
I'm taking a break this Lent from reading books on my kindle–which means that instead of binge-reading easy-to-digest sci-fi, fantasy, romance, mystery, and popular fiction, I'm pulling never-got-around-to-it paper books off my shelves. I'm grateful for the change of pace which brings me to harder-to-digest but far more memorable books like Cold Mountain.
And Cold Mountain makes me want to go find my book of Han Shan poems about another Cold Mountain (referenced in the novel's epigraph). And probably read more of The Odyssey to sniff out parallels.