For you a thousand times over...

It has been a while since I’ve picked up a good read. A really good read. I’ve stopped reading novels for quite a while preferring instead to read more ‘practical’ stuff like magazines, newspapers, reports, self-help books, parenting books, books on photography, the like. I’ve always had this guilt when I read a novel thinking that I could have spent my time reading something more ‘useful’! Because once I pick up a good novel, I would not put it down until I’ve finished reading it!! Like the current one I’m reading – “The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini. I bought it on a whim actually. My BH gave me a reading list she came up with and one of the books she wanted was “A Thousand Splendid Suns” by the same author. And while browsing for it, I came across his first book, “The Kite Runner”. I’ve heard about the movie and decided to have a go at the novel since I’ll be travelling a lot and could fill my time with a novel. On the way to Taiwan, the in-flight entertainment system listed “The Kite Runner” as one of the movies for viewing. I was tempted to watch it as I have already started reading the first 50 pages of the book and knew that it would be a good movie but I resisted. Watching the movie first would spoil the beauty of the discovering the written words. Would spoil how the story flows from page to page, would spoil the mental picture that unfolds as one reads the story. (WARNING! Spoiler ahead). And I did not regret the decision for the book is one of the best reads I’ve had in a long while. I cried at the part when Hassan ‘kissed the baby’s lifeless face’ after ‘Farzana gave birth to a stillborn baby girl’ and ‘buried her in the backyard, near the sweetbrier bushes’. Cried at the part when the Taliban took Hassan ‘to the street...and order him to kneel...and shot him in the back of the head’, when ‘Farzana came screaming and attacked them...shot her too.’ I always love a good cry whether watching a movie or reading a book. I forgot the last time I cried when reading a novel. When you read a novel such as “The Kite Runner” you grow close to the main characters and identify with them. You lose yourself in the novel and lose track of the time. You are torn between wanting to finish the novel to find out what happens in the end and from wanting to prolong the read so that you have something to look forward to...It’s like once you have finished the book, you leave the world that you have known, the characters that you have identified with. I’m in the last 100 pages of the book and although I want to find out what happens in the end, I also do not want it to finish too fast... Go have a read, you won’t regret it...