I was so excited when I heard Amber and Rachel were resurrecting the Collaboreads link up this month! You all know I love to read and sharing my monthly posts is one of my favorite things to do, but joining other readers in a monthly link up? Sold. I highly recommend hopping over to visit each of them tomorrow. I had to post a day early since tomorrow is Wardrobe Wesnesday! This month’s book criteria was to read a book by an author of a different race or ethnicity than your own. I mentioned last month that reading books my african american authors was something I wanted to pay more attention to, so I considered choosing something from that list, BUT this book has been on my shelf for three years and I’ve started it twice, but never finished. I decided this link up was exactly what I needed to finally check this one off my list!
Want to link up a post of your own for the next Collaboreads? The concept is simple — visit their blogs and see the criteria for the next link up, choose a really good book to read (you get at least thirty days!), share a review on your blog, use their linky form to share, visit some of the other bloggers participating, AND do it all over again next time!
Warning: Affiliate links appear in the following post. Although shopping the embedded links won’t cost you any additional dollars, it might mean that I download a few extra audio books this month. Your support of my reading habit is always appreciated!
AND THE MOUNTAINS ECHOED BY KHALED HOSSEINI
I have read so many excellent books this year and it makes me so happy. What that means, is that I’m choosing better books than I did last year and I don’t have to be embarrassed to tell you what they are. Embarrassed, you ask? I spent most of last year blazing through free downloads and selections from Kindle Unlimited and as nice and cheap as that all is, the books are less than stellar. I read far too many terrible romance novels and have nothing to show for it. Whomp whomp. This year, I’ve been so much more thoughtful about the books I’m choosing and, so far, they’ve almost all delivered.
Khaled Hosseini is an Afghan-born American novelist and physician. You may know him from his other two bestsellers, The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns. After writing his debut novel, Hosseini retired from medicine to write full time. His family moved from Afghanistan when he was 11 years old and he didn’t return until he was 36. In many interviews, he claimed his visit was like being a tourist in his own country and that he suffered from survivor’s guilt for escaping prior to the Soviet invasion and subsequent wars.
I can’t remember why we picked up his first novel, but I’m guessing it was because it was on the New York Times’ Bestsellers List and there was a ton of press at the time. I remember the book being very difficult to read, but simultaneously one of the most beautiful books I had read to date. We bought his two follow up novels when they were released and despite plowing through his second novel, I never gave this one the time it deserved. I’m not sure I even attempted to read it initially and last winter I did read all of seven pages before moving on. It wasn’t even that I didn’t enjoy it, I just got distracted by something else and never came back to it. I’d like to think it was because I needed to read it in August, but it could just as easily be a coincidence.
In honor of our first Collaboreads post in awhile, I thought I’d got back to the original structure that Amber and Rachel established in the beginning. Are you ready?!
RIVETING. The definition of riveting is “completely engrossing; compelling.” You should ask my husband if I found this book riveting. He would probably laugh out loud. I started it last Monday morning before work and finished it on Thursday evening. I didn’t have a ton of reading time last week, but I squeezed it into every free moment I had. I got up early every single morning and read for an hour over my cup of coffee and (I’m embarrassed to admit this) I finished the book in the bathtub — pizza in one hand, book in the other. This was definitely a page turner.
ELEMENTS. One of the things I liked best about this book was how it unfolded. Broken into nine chapters, almost every one told a story of a different cast of characters in a different time and place. The chapters were very long — think 40 or 50 pages each — so they gave you plenty of time to be engrossed in each story, but also made it difficult to walk away from them by the end. After the third or fourth chapter, I started keeping a list. I had a piece of scrap paper as a bookmark and on it I wrote the year of each chapter and who the main few characters were. I could see a fragile thread being strung across time and continents and I found it easier to follow along with my little list handy. The chapters didn’t happen in a linear fashion either. We moved from 1952 to 1949 to 2003 and back to 1974. It was really interesting to think about this story in chronological order after I was finished reading.
Even though I loved the book, I can’t say that I connected with the characters exactly. I do think that it’s entirely possible to fall in love with characters who you have absolutely nothing in common with, but that doesn’t necessarily make them relatable. As a very privileged, white woman in the richest country in the world, it’s hard to even fathom what people in other countries face on a daily basis. It’s so easy to complain about my own circumstances when they aren’t being compared to the atrocities in other places. I found myself consistently convicted about my own discontent while reading. There were several characters who had been westernized and when faced with their country of origin, were horrified by how much money they made (or spent), the state of their homes, and the things they decided to worry about. It’s heartbreaking to know that people have to choose between family and survival, but this book makes it very clear that it’s a reality for many people.
ASSOCIATE. It’s hard not to associate this with Hosseini’s prior two novels, but at the same time I found it very different. Perhaps the handful of modern chapters made it seem less similar, despite the settings being almost the same. I found this list on Goodreads of similarly styled novels. I hadn’t read any of them, but considering how much I loved this book, maybe I should. Although the time and place are very different, I couldn’t help relate this book to All the Light We Cannot See. The plot devices were very similar. It too was told from multiple perspectives, was a sweeping tale, and ultimately uncovered the motives behind choices we make and how even minor decisions can affect generations to come.
DESIGN. I can’t comment much on the design of this book because I threw away almost every book jacket in our house several months ago. Oops. I hated the way they looked on our bookshelves and so I removed them from the books we had already read. I will say that it was nice to hold a book in my hands for a change (I’m a huge fan of digital readers and audio books) and I found both the paper quality and typesetting perfect for reading.
STARS. Five out of five, without question. I have hardly a single critical thing to say about this book. I loved how the story was disjointed from the very beginning, but you just knew the author would make it all come full circle. The ending was both terribly sad and wonderfully redemptive. I cried a little (okay, a lot) while reading the book and I loved all of the folk tales and anecdotal moments throughout. This isn’t a “feel good” novel in the sense of happy, cheerful airport reading, but it is most definitely a book that will have you smiling from ear to ear in so many unexpected moments.
QUOTES. I marked two different quotes in the book that I loved. And although they are integral to the overall story, the book isn’t all about the place or plight of women. It’s happenstance that these are the two passages I marked while reading, but it’s probably pretty important that they both deal with how women are viewed — by men and later by other women.
“I was angry. I was angry about the attitude that I had to be protected from sex. That I had to be protected from my own body. Because I was a woman. And women, don’t you know, are emotionally, morally, and intellectually immature. They lack self control, you see, they’re vulnerable to physical temptation. They’re hypersexual beings who must be restrained lest they jump into bed with every Ahmad and Mahmood.” p212
“Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly.” p330
Thanks so much to Amber and Rachel for hosting us again — it was so much fun to join on a book related link up again and to be challenged to read something I might not normally gravitate towards. I’m looking forward to reading many more books by diverse authors and I can’t wait to report back. I’ll be back in a few weeks to share everything else I read this month, but you can find all of my book-related posts here. Happy Tuesday, friends!
