A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini

There are lines in this book that sing right off the page and make your heart swell at the same time. Hosseini is a master at this. I thought no other book could hold me in its grip as tightly as his first novel, The Kite Runner, but this book has had the same entrancing effect on me.

Check out this line from page 130 of the hardback edition of A Thousand Splendid Suns (pure poetry, in my opinion):

She would never leave her mark on Mammy's heart the way her brothers had, because Mammy's heart was like a pallid beach where Laila's footprints would forever wash away beneath the waves of sorrow that swelled and crashed, swelled and crashed.

Or, how about this line on page 201?

On and on he went. Mariam sat watching the girl out of the corner of her eye as Rasheed's demands and judgments rained down on them like the rockets on Kabul.

Further Thoughts on A Thousand Splendid Suns... A second entry on my blog based on further reading

News Update: Kite Runner actors flown out of the country for fear of reprisals - Four child actors in the film of the best-selling book The Kite Runner have been flown out of Afghanistan for their own safety. Their families fear the boys could suffer reprisals over the depiction of a male rape. Paramount Pictures delayed the U.S. release for six weeks to negotiate the young actors' passage out of their homeland.

More Links of Interest:
The Kite Runner Movie Website
The Author's Website

The Undomestic Goddess, by Sophie Kinsella

Last week I polished off one of many books written by Sophie Kinsella, albeit the first one of hers I'd ever read, The Undomestic Goddess. I was long familiar with the author by name, having been recommended her Shopaholic series by friends. However, for as long as I can remember, I've never let myself read too many of what I considered to be fluff books. I guess I thought the moment I picked up a romance or mystery novel and cracked the cover, my brain would immediately disintegrate into mush. I figured I had to stick to the important books, mainly nonfiction. I don't recall how I came by this rule I set for myself, but it wasn't until lately that I decided it was meant to be broken.

I picked up this most recent of Kinsella's laugh-out-loud novels at the airport when my boyfriend and I were headed back to Maryland from Missouri. And, I am happy to report that my brain is still intact. I was dead wrong. If anything, with this book, I couldn't wait until my next free moment, so that I could dive back into the world of Samantha Sweeting, a lawyer-turned-housekeeper just trying to keep her head above water.

After a harrowing turn of events that instantly changes the course of her immaculate legal career, Samantha panics, flees and ends up signing on as a domestic engineer, a job which encompasses all of the tasks she never got around to learning in her high-powered frenzy of everyday life -- chores such as cooking, ironing and washing laundry eluded her, until she was forced to demonstrate she was an expert at them all. Gulp... What transpires keeps the reader positively cemented to the seat to the very end... or at least it does this reader.