My Favorite Book

Off on another tangent to luck, I wanted to write about my favorite book. The books I have enjoyed have greatly impacted my outlooks on life. This in a metaphorical sense has "brought me luck." I always enjoyed reading but it had to be of my personal interests. There were many books in school that seemed to take an eternity to get through because of the dull topics or lack of descriptions and details. I would read and reread sentences and pages over and over again because I could not get into the books. There was one book that I was required to read in my senior year of high school that I remember enjoying the most. Khaled Hosseini, the author of the Kite Runner, strives to help Americans and those in forty-two other countries by using language that is understood to describe the feelings of men and women, poor and wealthy, and weak and strong in Afghanistan across three periods in history. His details throughout the book allowed my interest to be caught and kept. The tale is vividly descriptive and, although it is a fictitious novel, the authentic political events paint almost reality-based stories. I could not put the book down. The narrator of The Kite Runner is Amir. He starts off the novel with a foreshadowing of what is to come yet he is speaking of the past. “I looked up at those twin kites. I thought about Hassan. I thought about Baba. Ali. Kabul. I thought of the life I had lived until the winter of 1975 came along and changed everything. And made me what I am today.” We are taken on an adventurous journey full of twists and turns through his life from the time he is twelve years old and then twenty-six years later when he “has a chance to be good again.” The Kite Runner is set in Kabul, Afghanistan and holds the story in the peaceful days of the monarchy before General Khan was overthrown in 1973 and in America after Baba and Amir fled the country. The Kite Runner surrounds the tales of two boys, Amir and Hassan, and the friendship, brotherhood and family evolved between two class systems and worlds. “…Then he would remind us that there is a brotherhood between people who had fed from the same breast, a kinship that not even time could break. Hassan and I fed from the same breasts. We took our first steps on the same lawn in the same yard. And, under the same roof, we spoke our first words. Mine was Baba. His was Amir. My name. Looking back on it now, I think the foundation for what happened in the winter of 1975-and all the followed-was already laid in those first words…” One is the son of a wealthy merchant in Kabul and the other, his servant. The rape of Hassan and Amir’s sin to not save his friend becomes the focal point to all the sequences that follow. Afghanistan is changed internally and externally. In The Kite Runner, Amir says after returning back to his home twenty six years later “I stood outside the gates of my father’s house, feeling like a stranger. I remembered things that mattered not at all now and yet had seemed so important then. Most of the poplar trees had been chopped down-the trees Hassan and I used to climb to shine our mirrors into the neighbor’s homes. The Wall of Ailing Corn was still there, though I saw no corn, ailing or otherwise. The lawn was dotted by patches of dirt where nothing grew at all…The house itself is far from the sprawling white mansion I remembered from my childhood. It looked smaller. The roof sagged and the plaster cracked. The windows were broken and the paint, once sparkling white, had faded to ghostly gray and eroded in parts. Like so much else in Kabul, my father’s house was the picture of fallen splendor.” Afghanistan was changed and destroyed in every way possible by the Taliban control, even in a physical approach. Aristotle would name how we feel when reading The Kite Runner as catharses. USA Today says “…Hosseini’s writings make our hearts ache, our stomachs clench and our emotions reel…” Through his bewitching narrative, the struggle of life is captured and we feel one with each of the characters. Our sense of empathy, sympathy and love goes out to them all. Both books are intimate accounts of love and friendship and we are shown the reality of a culture unlike our own. To read about another culture's sufferings and substantial differences with my own, it was an eye-opener and greatly influenced my acceptances and opinions on other religions, cultures and countries.