This was a book club selection.
About a year ago I joined a book club, partly to get to know some of the other people at work and partly to read books that I would not otherwise read. Some of the books were okay, some I did not like at all and a very few I enjoyed.
This book fell somewhere between "okay" and "enjoyed"
I have started to enjoy reading books that are set in different cultures, it's fun to learn about the cultures while reading a story. I find it more interesting, however, to read memoirs. I like reading the true story of someone's experience as opposed to just a story.
This book was a story not a memoir but it was still quite interesting.
I do not know really anything about Afganistan so any little bit of history/culture was of interest to me. One of the things that I found the most striking was the descriptions of how the culture/society/politics changed when the monarchy was overthrown and Sharia law was enacted. I have read George Orwell's 1984 a number of times and I was struck by how Orwellian the change in Afganistan seemed to be. Orwell's book was written in 1948 and "predicted" a distopia for the future, and from reading A Thousand Splendid Suns it seeems that to some extent the distopia was a reality, not just fiction.
Overall, this story was okay but it was one of those books that made me realize (again) that there are so many things that I do not know about. And there are so many more things for me to learn
The books I have read (starting 9/9/07). So many times I read a book and then forget about it. This is my attempt to write down what I have read. The posting are not carefully crafted reviews, mostly just reactions.
