The Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini
number of voters: 6
percentage of voters who finished the book: 100%
highest rating: 8.75
lowest rating: 7
average rating: 7.92
percentage of readers who speak farsi: 0
number of book recappers who spent entirely too much time googling farsi words for this recap: 1
The First Monday Reading Group became what it is today in the year 2003, with a cool autumn read of the well-received The Secret Life of Bees.
Four years and forty-some books later, we start another year, another cool fall with another well-received ketaab (that is, book): Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner.
Hosseini’s vivid descriptions of his homeland of Afghanistan seep from the pages like dripping honey. One can almost see the kites dancing in the sky, smell the dusty air, and taste the ripe, juicy pomegranates.
The story is richly told with both broad strokes and tiny detail. Its well-drawn characters are both amiable and despicable, and sometimes at the same vaqt (time). The author weaves many colorful threads into a beautiful, devastating tapestry, and just as we begin to expect an ending in which all these threads are tied up neatly, the conclusion does nearly the ruberu (opposite), leaving a frayed and raw edge.
It is sometimes surprising to love a book that is so difficult to read, a book that is agonizing and heartbreaking but still manages to be lovely, a book that is so far removed from the life that we know. Truly, good literature can be measured by how well it conveys a time and place completely unknown to us and by how subtly it teaches us so much about another culture and its history.
And that brings us to this: In the novel, it is Rahim Kahn who says that there is a chance to be good again; Khaled Hosseini has found a way for literature to be good again as well.
