A Thousand Splendid Suns

Lying on the table next to me is a book --- Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns. I’ve been trying to read it for over a fortnight now, and for someone who regularly reads a few hundred pages a day, it is unusual for a book to be left unfinished for so long.

It’s impossible to say that it’s unreadable because the author doesn’t write well, or that the subjects he deals with are uninteresting. The problem for me is that he doesn’t speak of anything which I want to read about.

I’ve read fifteen chapters so far – not a number which means much considering that every chapter is but a few pages long. However, in every chapter, I see nothing which is alien to many women’s everyday lives. Nothing which one wouldn’t hear about while chatting with one’s friends. Nothing which one wouldn’t read about on the crime pages of newspapers. Or sometimes in the Features pages which speak endlessly about The Evils of Society.

Somehow, the content of the book is simply not what I want to read about in a novel. Real life, it seems to me, has more than enough sadness of the kind depicted in the book, and I’m not sure I need to read about a non-existent woman’s fictional life to begin to develop an appreciation for the sadness inherent in the lives of women such as her, and those unlike her.