Also, a book review

A Thousand Splendid Suns
by: Khalid Housseini

I just finished reading this the other day...I read it because I read his first book, The Kite Runner, and thought it was great.

This one, not so much. Mostly, I thought it was boring. I feel like I would read and read and read about nothing...and finally I'd come to a part that was riveting and the riveting-ness would last for a page, and then it was a lot of monotony again. Some of it was hard to follow, too. At times it jumped around and the sequence was hard to follow.

Really, though, the reason I didn't like the book was...well, there isn't a word for it so let me explain. The things that happened to Mariam and Laila were atrocious. Absolutely horrible. If it isn't/wasn't that bad in Afghanistan, then it was over the top. If life in Afghanistan is/was that awful, then it shouldn't be fictionalized. The more I read, the more I felt like I was being desensitized to the plight of Afghanistan's women. I mean, we all know living conditions aren't great for women there. If we are reading fictional accounts of how bad it is, we aren't going to believe true accounts of how awful it is. Just as they say children are becoming desensitized to violence because of TV, we will become desensitized to the horrors of Middle Eastern culture if we continue to read fiction. If life really is that atrocious there and Housseini wants the world to know about it, he needs to write non-fiction, truth and engage the world in the plight of women and children in Afghanistan...not half-truth so that nobody really knows what is true and what isn't.

And, this book just wasn't as well written as the first.

Oh, dear...I believe I turned my ankle stepping off yet another soapbox.