I’ve got nothing to write about these current passing days. So I took the liberty to fill in the “Empty Spaces” by writing the reviews I planned to write.
… Yeah.
-HolyJunkie.
PS. DISCLAIMER: That guy on the side of the header beside Jakob is not me. It’s a meme that’s actually funny that’s starting to spread. Namely the face itself.
Seriously, it’s priceless. I love it.
This is a book written by the same guy who wrote “The Kite Runner”.
For those wondering, it’s Khaled Hosseini. From what I’ve heard and seen and read, he’s mainly writing books based in the Middle East, when crap goes down and the worst-case scenario doesn’t look so bad.
Of course, it can’t really be as bad as the stuff in Africa that we probably don’t even know about yet… or stuff the KKK has done… or… um…
Actually, maybe it is as bad as it seems. Since reading this book, I never really know which foreign slaughter and war actually seems the worst. In my opinion, war is only good when it does not involve actual death.
In such cases, I refer to video games being a much cheaper way of showing who’s the better in terms of military might.
Seriously, invent Virtual Reality and set up a secure system somewhere in the UN or someplace. If you want to fight a war, go with a squad-based team game. Hire your best gamers… or motion capture guys… or just fighters anyway… and have them fight it out in VR. Nobody dies, wars settle more quickly, and it’s actually more enjoyable. We can then concentrate funding on more important matters: Like getting us onto another bloody planet!
Right. There’s one half of my usual “Review / Opinions” posts, here’s the review.
A Thousand Splendid Suns looks through the eyes of two characters who have both been raised differently and experienced differently. The first one, older than the latter by nineteen years, and the younger… well, nineteen years younger than the first. Their names are Mariam and Laila respectively.
Truth be told, I never thought suck cool names could exist. Makes me want to look into their culture some more. After all: tolerance and understanding only comes out of doing your research and seeing the beauty under what’s discovered. One of the first things that became obvious was the fact that Khaled very often wrote native names, and showing what they meant soon after.
Mariam is what is described as a “harami”, which is more or less, a bastard (illegitimate child) and lives in a crappy kolba (I think that’s some kind of slum house) in the middle of seemingly nowhere. She is raised in two different ways by her mother (tough, mean, but deep-down truthful) and her father (shallow, nice, kind).
Later on, she gets married and moves to Kabul from Herat (I’m not sure if Herat is a real town. I know Kabul is.) And at the age of nineteen, on the night of… well, everything starting to hit the fan, Laila was born.
Now Laila. She’s raised nicely, not a “harami”, and makes friends. She lives out a nice life with her mother and father (even though her mother goes on a bout of depression after hearing that her sons died in the war) She lives in good happiness under the Soviets (IMO, their “equal citizenship” had to be one of the few things the Soviets did right.) and then it all hits the deck when the Soviets are driven out, and civil war breaks out.
Then the Taliban comes in and stuff.
It’s based on the thirty-odd years where Afphganistan plunges into civil war and everything that’s not good at all. Shows in pretty good detail how women and men alike had to suffer through it all.
The characters had depth, and they were developed incredibly nicely. There were plot twists that were there that seldom even came as a surprise to me. That may sound like a bad thing, but this is in the middle of destruction and war. Anything could happen. I respected that fact, and found everything that happened within the destruction to be worth knowing and original.
He wrote it in a splendid way that allowed me to almost literally feel like I was there. Descriptions were short, sweet, and told everything that was needed.
To be honest, I rather like this author. Recommendations for the win.
-HolyJunkie.
