The Kite Runner: 21 Great Bloomsbury Reads for the 21st Century
11 journalers for this copy...
The Kite Runner of Khaled Hosseini's deeply moving fiction debut is an illiterate Afghan boy with an uncanny instinct for predicting exactly where a downed kite will land. Growing up in the city of Kabul in the early 1970s, Hassan was narrator Amir's closest friend even though the loyal 11-year-old with "a face like a Chinese doll" was the son of Amir's father's servant and a member of Afghanistan's despised Hazara minority. But in 1975, on the day of Kabul's annual kite-fighting tournament, something unspeakable happened between the two boys.
Narrated by Amir, a 40-year-old novelist living in California, The Kite Runner tells the gripping story of a boyhood friendship destroyed by jealousy, fear, and the kind of ruthless evil that transcends mere politics. Running parallel to this personal narrative of loss and redemption is the story of modern Afghanistan and of Amir's equally guilt-ridden relationship with the war-torn city of his birth. The first Afghan novel to be written in English, The Kite Runner begins in the final days of King Zahir Shah's 40-year reign and traces the country's fall from a secluded oasis to a tank-strewn battlefield controlled by the Russians and then the trigger-happy Taliban. When Amir returns to Kabul to rescue Hassan's orphaned child, the personal and the political get tangled together in a plot that is as suspenseful as it is taut with feeling.
The son of an Afghan diplomat whose family received political asylum in the United States in 1980, Hosseini combines the unflinching realism of a war correspondent with the satisfying emotional pull of master storytellers such as Rohinton Mistry. Like the kite that is its central image, the story line of this mesmerizing first novel occasionally dips and seems almost to dive to the ground. But Hosseini ultimately keeps everything airborne until his heartrending conclusion in an American picnic park. --Lisa Alward, Amazon.ca --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
I will NOT revive this bookray again! Once is enough for me.
Guidelines:
PM me to join!
You must be willing to mail internationally to join (surface/economy mail more than fine!)
Make a JE when you receive the book
Read it within a month
PM the next person on the list for their address
Make a JE saying what you thought of the book
Send the book along
The participants are:
Klaradyn, South Africa
RalieghDog, USA
Quinsmomma, USA
Loribee, UK
meexia,Singapore
menita, USA
ealasaidmae, USA
Thanks again for sharing, Sobergirl! Sent the book to RalieghDog this morning, using surface mail.
I Pmed the next person yesterday and am anxiously awaiting an addy so the book can continue on its journey.
This book has now been sent along to Meexia. Sorry it took so long (went on honeymoon and forgot to mail it).
REVIEW
Great start. I was already teary on the first dozen of pages or so. Although after going further, I found myself sometimes on the brink of worry that the book would be too soap-opera like. It just seemed to be at the tip of being sad in a nice heartbreaking way, or cliche and cheesy. It could easily go one way or the other. But at the end though, I think I would give the book a break and forget about being too critical. I enjoyed it. It’s nice. It’s nice story about unfamiliar culture, family saga, in a land far far away. And it’s sad. It’s sad because you grow attached to the characters and care for them. When calamity happens, you feel for them.
I especially found the relationships between the men (and boys) in the story interesting. Father and son, master and servant, family, friends, brothers.. There’s certain intimacy that I thought doesn’t really exist among a lot of other cultures. They also seemed to be more comfortable at crying and showing affections between males. (and some people go to sickening extreme…)
Complete review on my site
This book is travelling to ETMadrid in the UK, who requested it as part of the Library Sale RABCK. I hope you enjoy it and I hope you can get your ring going again!
Anyway, once I've finished the next couple of books I've got lined up, it'll be my next read and should then head off to other fellow bookring participants. I look forward to it. Thanks too for the postcard of the Appalachian sunset whose colours match so well the cover of the book :)
Thank you so much for giving me this opportunity to read it. I've not heard back from nawoo82 (that was true at time of writing but we later were in contact), but her bookring for this is one I was signed up to and has been stuck since February. So I'm reconstructing her list of participants in a somewhat modified order, and adding a couple of new ones:
sharonrocks (UK)
24-7-365Reader (UK)
Scruffykaz (UK)
Martin1960 (UK)
<-------the book is here!
hopi100 (US)
If you see that you won't be finished with the book within about 6 weeks, please be sure to show signs of life and let us know where you are with it.
Please journal your impressions of the book and do a release entry when you pass it on.
Released 15 yrs ago (11/28/2008 UTC) at -- Trains, Tube, Buses --, Greater London United Kingdom
CONTROLLED RELEASE NOTES:
Posted to Nottingham.
Sharon x
Thanks again. I want to read more on Afghanistan now.
Released 15 yrs ago (1/17/2009 UTC) at Ruddington, Nottinghamshire United Kingdom
CONTROLLED RELEASE NOTES:
This book is now on its way to the next reader. Thanks again and sorry for having it for rather longer than I should - Christmas kind of got in the way (as it does!)
Edited - Kirstykat has alsp asked to be skipped so I will contact the next peron on the list
Looking forward to reading. Looks like a really good book!
I immediately engaged with the characters. I felt Amir's pain and was rooting for him all the way through the book, I felt Hassan's loyalty and goodness.
I didn't want this book to end. It was a story of friendship, loyalty, betrayal and putting things right. The ending wasn't too cliched and worked for me.
I definitely want to read more by Khaled Hossenini
Released 14 yrs ago (5/1/2009 UTC) at -- Controlled Release, -- By post or by hand/ in person -- United Kingdom
CONTROLLED RELEASE NOTES:
Sending to the next person on the list. Hope you enjoy as much as I did!
Addendum: Martin1960 you should now have Hopi100's address - she's next on the list.
A quick not to ETMadrid:
Thanks for all the nasty emails, don't worry I won't be partaking in any of your bookrings again. In fact I may consider giving bookcrossing up, until now all the bookcrossers I have met have been nice people.
Martin1960 I'm quite shocked by your note to me and very sorry that you feel that way. I've a record of all our communication, that I've just re-read, and am relieved that I haven't found anything, that I at least consider, out of order in the contents. As for anything nasty, well, I'm rather saddened by this accusation. Your comment (the only thing I can find to fall into that category) however makes me feel I should do a quick re-cap, so here goes:
6th July: I wrote a PM offering help in finding new readers (knowing that a closer destination was preferred). Here's my first message: "If you'd like, I could post a message on the forum to see if there are any
other readers interested in Europe before it goes to the US... Let me know. Regards,"
27th July: PM asking for news and asking who he'd contacted and letting him know that I knew someone in London interested if the ray was to end there.
8th Sep: PM asking for an update (and ending "This is
my 3rd message and I also posted on the forum, still to no avail...") I'm sorry if you took this as rude.
29th Sep: PM hoping the holiday went well, asking for news.
30th Sep: I received a reply from Martin1960 saying he was trying to get an address and saying any help would be appreciated.
Same day: I replied asking who he'd been contacting, had he tried emailing (as per CollegeLady's bookshelf page), if he'd tried the next person and offering to look for new participants.
I gave up hoping for a reply on 6th Oct and decided to do it myself:
6th Oct I PMed CollegeLady.
14th Oct I PMed Martin1960 again asking for an update.
17th Oct I emailed (the PM not having worked) CollegeLady and received a reply on the same day saying she's read it already.
19th Oct I PMed Hopi100 and received a reply on the same day. I then PMed her address to Martin1960, and I did say that I'd got responses very quickly (yes, I was frustrated, but think I kept most of that to myself) and also confirming I'd tried to get other participants. I PMed Hopi100 to confirm and asked her to do the same.
27th Oct I PMed Hopi100 asking if she'd heard back. She agreed to try contacting him again and said she'd let me know if she had news. And that's the last of it until today's journal.
Blimey this is boring. I do apologise. I'd be delighted to delete all of this as soon as the previous note is deleted, as it would be a shame to blight the course of this book with such trivialities. I wrote 8 messages to Martin1960 and also sometimes posted in the forum thread about this bookring, in case my PMs were not getting through. I received one reply that was not very precise. I really don't mind how long the book stays in one place, nor is it the end of the world if it gets lost, after all it's only a book. But I was frustrated, I don't mind admitting, a)that I didn't get any replies b) that I ended up being the one to get the address needed and c) I'll say it again! that I didn't get any reply! A word at any stage about a problem getting onto the internet, if appropriate, would have been good - I certainly can understand that. Communication is the key, to this and most things in life. I'd even thought about offering to receive it here in London and forward it myself, if postage abroad was the problem, but for that, I'd have needed a little more news.
As to whether Martin1960 you continue to bookcross or not, I do hope that you will be able to get over this unfortunate misunderstanding and continue! Among other things, it might be worth having another look over the history of this book to see that there are many people to thank for this bookray's existence, and it is with a sense of gratitude to them that I was keen to get it to continue.
So there we go. Now you know. Unfortunately by doing this I've given more time to it than it merits, but I'm not prepared to let such a remark lie.