Before reading Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain ...
Before reading Charles Frazier's 1997 novel Cold Mountain , literature was something I had come to have affinity for but still saw as something foreign, exotic. My senior year of high school, my English teacher had told me that he thought I had a mind that would enjoy, as he put it, "literature," which I understood to be very different from the Tom Clancy books I had read as a child (I was precocious in that regard, and thanks in no small part to Clancy's influence I still curse far more often than most) or the history books and fantasy novels that had sustained me throughout high school. Proud of his belief that I was capable of appreciating "literature," I checked Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls out from the library because I recognized the title from one of the pieces we'd read in that English class, and found that the teacher was right. I loved the fact that the novel ended with the protagonist completing his mission - bombing a fasci...