Years ago a reader advised or cautioned me not to review books. I'm not certain whether she or he preferred to absorb and judge books without the burden of another's opinion, preferences and biases, or perhaps preferred more professional insights.
I have one major problem with this well-intentioned advice. Naturally I prefer to write about personal adventures, experiences and explorations. I don't know about you, but I just do not have 52 exciting encounters annually.
During the winter months I attend half a dozen lectures a month, delivered by experts on subjects expounded upon or interpreted, and often the results insinuate themselves into my columns without a pretense of offering detailed reports.
Additionally, I am an avid reader, although this is somewhat curtailed by attendant eyestrain, and even my capacity for absorbing the products of talented, prolific and imaginative writers and their diverse influence on a grateful and envious mind.
So when I read a book and am fascinated by it, it is not my intention to write a review, but simply to pass on to readers whatever strikes me and compels me to recommend what I have read with the hope that they too will find in it something of interest, intellectual enhancement or a view of our world as it once was or exists today.
Obviously, I am on the verge of such an embarkation. To capsulize I might use a few lines of a silly ditty learned in childhood. It begins: "I've never seen a purple cow, and never hope to see one." That puts the finger right on how I have felt about the Asian nation of Afghanistan. I could not have told you where to find it on a map (it lies between Iran and Pakistan).
When I received a book, "The Kite Runner," written by Khaled Hosseini (born in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1965), I wondered how the subject matter or the thoughts of the writer could be of any possible interest to me.
The writer now lives in the United States. "Kite Runner" was and continues to be a bestseller, and was published in 34 countries. From the beginning, I was fascinated by the writer's faculty for presenting a story about his native land and its people, forthrightly and with astonishing depth and sensitivity, yet writing un-judgmentally about situations so foreign to most prospective readers. Aside from that, his ability to translate his insights into a language obviously not his first is nothing short of phenomenal.
As I write, I am near completing a second novel, "A Thousand Splendid Suns", which in my opinion eclipses "Kite Runner" for its uncompromisingly blunt portrayal of that poverty-stricken, brutally savage and (in my opinion), intellectually crippled land, over a period of three decades from the abortive Soviet invasion "to the reign of the Taliban and post-Taliban rebuilding."
How, upon earnest consideration, this will affect my view on our country's continued part in liberating this land from the consequences of those decades, I'm still not sure. But I'm thinking, I'm thinking.
Surely you will agree that as a book review, the foregoing does not even qualify as one-quarter of a book review. It is intended only as an invitation to discover, as I did, a fascinating tale by a talented and inspired young man who is only at the beginning of his interpretation of a strange world as he finds and describes it.
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