Three Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin

Greg Mortenson didn’t set out to be a hero. Shortly before he stumbled into a mountain village in northern Pakistan, he was wandering around on K2 trying to save his own life. Out of gratitude to the villagers who took him in following his climbing expedition gone awry, he promised to come back and build [...]

The Carpet Wars, by Christopher Kremmer

I usually am not fond of travel writing, but I found Christopher Kremmer’s work more interesting than some others of that genre that I have encountered. Kremmer’s wry wit accounts for at least part of the entertainment value of The Carpet Wars, even eliciting a few chuckles, a somewhat rare occurrence. (Don’t analyze that last [...]

The Bookseller of Kabul, by Asne Seierstad

The Bookseller of Kabul is an outsider’s perspective on the inside world of an Afghan family. Asne Seierstad lived with a family in Kabul—a bookseller’s family—in the spring of 2002, after the fall of the Taliban in 2001. This book is not so much about her experiences as about the family she lived with.

A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini (post no. 2)

 
In our first post concerning A Thousand Splendid Suns, we discussed the story in A Thousand Splendid Suns. This time we want to consider some of the stylistic techniques that contribute to the popularity of Hosseini’s works.
Hosseini’s books are not adventure novels, but the action rarely flags. We are introduced to the main character [...]

A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini (post no. 1)

We read A Thousand Splendid Suns in two days while on a mini vacation. We had anticipated a grim story, and our expectations were fulfilled. But we stayed glued to the book, in part because of Hosseini’s gripping story telling and in part because, judging from the conclusion of The Kite Runner, we anticipated a [...]

Land Beyond the River, by Monica Whitlock

Monica Whitlock’s Land Beyond the River is an informative journalistic description of the social and political developments in Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and Uzbekistan during the 20th century. We borrowed the book from the library but decided it would be worth owning because of its accounts of events difficult to find detailed in one place elsewhere, such [...]

Central Asia Books

We frequently regret that the number of books in the world exceeds the time available for reading them. Even the count of volumes in English that we want to read is formidable, though significantly less. And, unlikely as it might seem considering their relative sparsity, we probably won’t even get around to reading all the [...]

The Great Game, by Peter Hopkirk

I must have slept through the unit on the 19th century in high school World History. Until I read Peter Hopkirk’s The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia, I was woefully ignorant of the events that took place in Central Asia during that era, despite having lived in Pakistan for two years [...]

Khaled Hosseini’s New Release

Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns went on sale yesterday (May 22). His Kite Runner was a bestseller and one of our all-time favorites (see our review, posted May 7, ‘07.) We can’t wait to read his new novel, this time about women in Afghanistan.
Visit Hosseini’s site to learn more about the author and his [...]

Kite Runner and Persian Folklore

This novel by Khaled Hosseini is among my all-time favorites, for its engaging story line, heroic characters, failure and redemption, suspense, drama … Beyond that, my experience in the Persian-speaking world (I spent two years teaching English to Afghans in Pakistan in the mid-’90s, and the two of us spent two years in the former [...]