What does Annie do? Read :)

Well, I have read Cold Mountain. And it wasn’t half as bad as multiple people made it out to be. I liked Ruby, and Inman too. Ada was a bit annoying but not wretched. The language was not riveting . . . what made it worthwhile? The philosophical musings perhaps. The attentiveness to nature, to the individual aspects of the terrain of home. Those are probably the very things that have turned folks off to Charles Frazier’s novel, but it is where I was able to connect, even though initially the descriptions seemed wanting of eloquence, they did bring back the wee romantic’s desire to go play in the Appalachian Mountains and reminded me of the expansiveness of my own playground, but taken down to Cold Mountain level: The color, the feel, the emotion of one stream/river/creek in one place. Inman has vivid, almost developed beyond reality, memory of the land of Black Cove and Cold Mountain, of detail. It is easy enough to be enamored of a place as a vague whole, but it takes and is so much more to pay attention to the individual brush strokes and how they make up the whole. The aspects of the land become poetical fragments; all together the poem is complete, but each separate line, word group, is captivating in its own right. In a nutshell: it is about a woman, Ada, left to tend a large amount of land with no knowledge of the how and a soldier’s journey to this woman through the south and up into the mountains; it is about the people who transform Ada and the people transformed by Inman, with the Civil War and lack of trust permeating their lives.

The Dream Life of Sukhanov by Olga Grushin. Read it. It is not a fast read, if read quickly, the book is lost. But it is hard to put down. Grushin has a way with word and description that paints portraits of the Russian landscape and life with incredible potency. The language is genius; it flows and swirls and stumbles with Sukhanov and the life that seems to be taking place around him, behind him, within him, and apart from him, as the surreal present collides with the neglected past. The words color and leap from the page, enrapturing the senses to feel and experience, yet releasing long enough to chastise Sukhanov, but before one can flounce off in disgust of his outbursts, his insensitivity, his seeming stupidity even, there is pull to pity, to relate, and again, one is lost weaving in and out of that potent dream life with Sukhanov, as Sukhanov.