Book Review: The Kite Runner

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The Kite Runner The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini


My review


rating: 5 of 5 stars
I cried 4 or 5 times reading this book. It is an incredibly heart-wrenching tale of cowardice, remorse, loss, good, evil, and ambiguous redemption. There are heroes in this book, but they do not succeed in the traditional way. Against violent opposition, saintly people die. It's enough to make you really want to believe in heaven.



This book is also a badly needed humanization of Afghanistan, a reminder that there was a strong community living there before the Russians and then the Taliban destroyed what was there.


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Photo processing service needed

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Basically I need a service where I can mail in my film, have negatives developed, scanned, and then uploaded to Flickr into my account. A 5MB scan or higher would be good, with no correction. I don't care about getting the physical negatives back. Does a service like that exist?

Book Review: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz


My review


rating: 5 of 5 stars
What an amazing book. I don't normally go for Pullitzer Prize winners, Oprah Book club stuff, but this book was amazing. The book is not fantasy or science fiction (although you could argue there's a dollop of urban fantasy) but there are quite subtle inside references throughout to LOTR, Dune, the Watchmen, and Akira. This was just the icing on a vibrant, multi-lingual narrative that was so juicy Jonot could have kept me interested describing how grass grows, in real time.

Of course, the actual story was much more intense than the growing of grass. The central character, Oscar, is perhaps the ultimate nerd, the ultimate ne'er do well outsider, and Junot goes to great lengths to put him in his time and his circumstance, and manages to pull in 3 generations of his family and the terrible history of Trujillo and the Domincan Republic, and the life of DR immigrants in New Jersey.

The narrative begins and ends with Oscar, but Junot does something only the best authors can - he interrupts his narrative, sometimes quite abruptly, introducing new characters who manage to hold one's interest even more than the last characters. What makes this even better is that the new characters are often younger versions of supporting characters in previous pages, and this time seen in a very different (always more sympathetic) light. It's as if he's explaining "how they got that way". This is particulary true of the mother, Beli, who is first presented as a terrible force in Oscar's life, hard and relentless, and later painted as a little girl, conceived at the tail end of her great families fall, taken in by monsters, saved by distant family, and destroyed by her powerful ability to love.

I feel like I should say "This book changed my life" but really, it hasn't. I am relieved to report that this book does not have any life lessons, except perhaps for the oldy but goody that you should be grateful for what you have, especially something we take for granted, political freedom. Bush may have been bad, but let's face it, he was no Trujillo. I think that our own complaints sound very tinny and small next to the brutality in this book.

Live your life, speak your mind, and maybe you can write a book like this someday, my love.


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