Yesterday was Canada Day, and I spent about 8 hours sitting on Parliament Hill.  While I was sitting there getting sunburnt, I read The Kite Runner.  I hadn’t planned on reading this book, and in fact left the Hill to go to Chapters and buy a book.  To go even further, I had actively avoided reading this book for several years because I knew of one of its major plotlines and didn’t think I could handle it.

I should have trusted my first instinct, because this was an incredibly sad book.  Quite possibly the most depressing book I have ever read.  For sheer amount of bad things that happen to central characters it still doesn’t quite match the horror of A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, but with Khaled Hosseini’s work I actually really cared about the characters.  I was quite invested in them, and there were several times I made the cliched move of gasping outloud or setting the book down for a time because I had to take an emotional break.

And I’ve learned never to tempt the literary fates with the words “It can’t possibly get any worse!” HA!

All that aside, it was a very good book.  It always feels weird to say I liked a book that is so dark, but it certainly touched me, raised some questions and probably would have made me cry if I hadn’t been in public.  I’m not sure I could ever see the movie (but who knows, maybe I’m a bigger masochist than I thought).  But if you’re prepared to feel an incredibly wide range of emotions, I highly, highly reccommend this book.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 at 8:04 pm and is filed under Books, reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.