High as Kites

Ugggh! It can't be after 10 a.m. already, can it? I don't know what Sham put in the (delicious!) chocolate mousse last night, but I've only just crawled out of bed feeling like yesterday's left-overs reheated.

(This after two different people told me yesterday "I don't know how you get up so early to post on your blog, day after day"! Sorry to sully my unblemished record. )

Maybe it was brain-burn-out brought on by all the intellectual discussion generated by our reading group meeting last night when Fiction&Friends met to discuss our book of the month at Sham's house - The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.

For those of you who don't know the book, it is the story of two motherless boys (Amir, the son of a wealthy buisness man in Kabul, and Hassan who is the son of their Hazara servant ) who grow up as inseperable friends. Then an act of violence, which Amir makes no attempt to stop, shatters the friendship. Amir's cowardice continues to haunts him, even after he has fled to America, married, and built a successful career as a writer. He is finally given the opportunity to confront the demons of his past in a perilous journey into war-torn Afganistan.

Extremely readable, the book got a firm thumbs up from everyone. Most had had an emotional journey through it, and used up plenty of tissues. (Though not cynical old me.) We loved the setting, which showed us prewar Kabul and gave us cultural insights into a country most of us know only from news bulletins.

(If you've enjoyed the book, you might like to read Khaled Hosseini's fascinating account of his real-life journey back to Kabul to find his father's house after the book was written, only to find how much art imitiates life.)

The dramatic "sin and redemption" theme, the almost stock-villain Aseef, and the obvious contrivance of the plot twists were explained neatly by my reading group buddies. "It's just like a Hindi movie," they all agreed, and being Bollywood fans loved the book even more for that.

Krishna provided the biggest laugh of the evening when he started talking about the events in "the third-half of the book" and couldn't see why we were all falling about. He should have been born blonde.