Cold Mountain

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.