Yat Does Book Reviews...

I just finished reading A Thousand Splendid Suns, a novel by Khaled Hosseini. Many of you know him as the author of The Kite Runner, an incredible debut novel published in 2003. Even after all that time, it still sits at #3 on NY Times Best Sellers in the Paperback Fiction category. Doing some quick research for this post, I also discovered that (according to IMDB), the movie will be released later this year, and, (according to Wikipedia), it was the first novel published in English by an author from Afghanistan.

First of all, not to be on his jock or anything, but I can’t get over how incredibly talented this man is. A medical doctor by training, then a bestselling author, and most recently, a goodwill envoy to UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency. I am absolutely nothing. If you haven’t yet, go out and read The Kite Runner. At that point, I won’t even have to convince you to read A Thousand Splendid Suns (I pre-ordered it several months ago from amazon.com about 5 minutes after they emailed me letting me know it was available).

Without giving away much of the plot, both novels take place in Afghanistan over the last 30 or so years, starting with the pre-Soviet days, to the Soviet invasion, to the emergence of the Taliban, to the post-Taliban “cleanup.” I’ve found both novels incredibly enlightening on the politics and history of the region. I read A Thousand Splendid Suns with my laptop at my side pretty much throughout, often googling some of the names and places mentioned in the story, and found the references and descriptions to be almost incredibly accurate.

This is gonna sound corny, but the most important thing I have gotten from both novels is that each has made me appreciate the circumstances I’ve been fortunate enough to be raised in. It’s easy to forget how good we (most of us) have it, given how removed we are from most of the world’s great atrocities – the ongoing war in the Middle East (not just Iraq), genocide in Darfur, wars being fought by drugged child soldiers, hunger everywhere, etc., etc., etc. I think the closest we’ve come to seeing anything that devastating here in the U.S. in recent memory is with Hurricane Katrina and what it did to the city and residents of the New Orleans area. But Katrina, of course, was not a man-made disaster and, on top of that, how many of us have actually seen the impact, or know people directly impacted? I’m not proud of it, but I have to admit it sometimes takes powerful fiction such as that given to us by Khaled Hosseini to make me thankful for what I have.

Do yourself a favor and give at least one of these novels a read. I swear, I’m not getting any commissions.