“The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini

Read from Janauary to February 2007. This is a sweet and emotionally charged story of a man coming to terms with mistakes in his youth while describing Kabul pre Russian invasion. This story has several themes that are wound together through the fabric of a man reflrecting on his youth. Each theme is completed in one way or another, even if some cheesiness ensues in the process. Hosseini uses a clever technique of writing as a child when flashing back to his the main character’s childhood.

The story itself takes one too many familiar twists, and leaves the reader feeling like he is reading the story to an upcoming Bollywood film (though not nearly as over-acted). The ending can be predicted about 100 pages from the ending, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but makes it clear that the predictable becomes reality in the story.

The story also describes the Russian invasion through the eyes of the main character, as a child. As the main character goes back to Kabul in the early 1990s and witnesses the Taliban’s effect on his childhood home, the story describes the Taliban in a very real and terrifying way.

I would recommend this if you are interested in having a story with anecdotal knowledge about an Afghani immigrant to San Francisco in the early 1990s.

Read more about it from Amazon.com.