I finished A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini last Friday and then I read Douglas Coupland’s, Eleanor Rigby and now I have started The Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger but when I really think about it this is not a lot of reading I have only completed eleven books so far this year and I blame this low number on Guitar Hero which will get its own post for all you gamers out there, I think what five maybe ten gamers read my blog and you don’t even all comment, correct me if I am wrong, but that is ok because I KNOW you wanna know how good I am at Guitar Hero I KNOW. But this post is about books.

I had been looking forward to reading A Thousand Splendid Suns being that Khaled Hosseini’s first book The Kite Runner was a superb read. I literally flew through it and I have never been a particularly fast reader. A Thousand Splendid Suns took me longer to read for various reasons but was so good I relayed almost the entire book to Adam as I went. I love that The Kite Runner set in Afghanistan and America is centered around men mainly father and son relationships but then A Thousand Splendid Suns is the complete opposite and concentrates on the woman of Afghanistan. The book made me cry, which almost never happens, I can’t even remember the last book that did so. Even though you get a happy ending when you read Hosseini’s books it doesn’t come without some pretty extreme sacrifices, and I get seriously tired of fictional happy endings. A Thousand Splendid Suns takes you right from the Soviet invasion in 1979 straight up to a few years shy of present day. Reading fictional books set in war torn countries are sometimes not very far off the actual, from what I gather, to be the realities that the persons in these novels face. I think because I read both non fiction and fiction war novels I can safely say it is much easier to separate from the horrors of the fictional novels than it is from the non fiction, although the violence, the lost innocence, the torture, the deaths and the setting are all but the same. I love the way this man weaves his heart-wrenching tales with characters who stay with you long after their stories have been told.

Eleanor Rigby was better than I thought it would be but not one of Coupland’s strongest efforts by a long shot. I found that I was able to bond with the main character over her struggles with loneliness but not on the same level just the word, loneliness. She is essentially a middle aged single woman who thinks that she leads and has lead an extraordinarily boring life and her family would agree until one day something astonishing happens and you guessed it she discovers she and her life are not so boring after all. The book contains many good one liners that had me laughing out loud and I regret not marking the pages. This is one of Coupland’s many books set in Vancouver, he is not the only local author whose books I have read but he is in my opinion likely the best in making me feel like I am really in Vancouver. Although in the book Stanley Park, Timothy Taylor gives an absolutely uncanny depiction of Vancouver’s West End [where I live] and of the our Province’s largely known Stanley Park.

The Time Traveler’s Wife was supposed to be a family book club pick but that meeting got canceled although we are having a meeting at Christmas! Adam started reading it and couldn’t stop laughing and because the first rule of family book club is NO TALKING ABOUT THE BOOK UNTIL THE MEETING I viewed this laugher as obvious and vulgar RULE BREAKAGE. When the meeting was canceled Adam practically rejoiced and the book has been collecting dust on the shelf ever since. The thing is, the bloody book is EVERY WHERE right now I have had A LOT of people telling me to read it and *basically* everyone I know who has read it EXCEPT for Adam has loved it. So out of pure curiosity I am reading it now. I would have read it eventually but I am reading it much sooner than expected but I need to know what all this bloody fuss is about and if it sucks I can’t wait to smash the crap out of it via review.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 17th, 2007 at 6:45 pm and is filed under Books, T.V. & Movies, Playstation, War Torn. 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. All content (c) 2005 - 2008 Gus Greeper, unless otherwise credited. All rights reserved.