The Kite Runner (Khaled Housseini)

Housseini is a doctor by trade, who wrote a national best-seller his first time out of the gates (which makes me very envious and proud of him simultaneously). He's a good writer, more with plot than with fancy description but good. And a story set in Afghanistan, that relates some of the culture and history of the country in language that American's can understand, is a hot commodity in this day and age when we are all struggling to comprehend the events of the world around us.

This is the story of two boys, one rich and one poor, one master and one servant, one racially "superior" and one "inferior." The master, Ali, flies the kite in local competitions where each man must cut loose the kite of his rival with the glass-edged string of his own kite. The servant, Hasan, then runs to fetch the lost kites--the Kite Runner, you see--and has an uncanny knack for the task. "Anything for you," he says, with true devotion. But history and human weakness separates these life-long friends.

Remember the holocaust poem that you were made to read, silently and aloud, as homework and at assemblies, about speaking up? And when they came to take me, there was no one left to speak. This is a story about how a life can be lost, spiritually that is, by doing nothing at all. By letting something evil happen, you inherit that evil and carry it around for life, your own back-grinding load. But of course there is redemption. Come on, you knew there was going to be redemption, right?