The Kite Runner

 The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, 372 pages.

Amir and Hassan (the son of his father's servant) are best friends and the kings of Kabul (or at least that's what they tell themselves. They go through the trials and tribulations that many young boys do, but everything changes when Hassan goes through something much worse, and everything breaks between them. And then things quickly start breaking all across Afghanistan, as war and political unrest force Amir and his father to immigrate to America. Decades later Amir gets a call in California calling him home, and promising that he can atone for his past. What follows is a harrowing journey to a city full of memories.

It took me a really long time to figure out how to write about this book, and I still don't think I did it justice. It's a story with a lot going on, both plot-wise and structurally. It's a novel about stories that can't seem to stop, and about human connections, and justice, and also about Afghanistan. It's extremely well-done and emotionally difficult to read and I would definitely recommend it. This has been on my to-read list for literally a decade now and I'm very glad I finally got to it. 

The Poet

The Poet by Michael Connelly  510 pp.

I have never read any of Connelly's books before and I'm not sure I will again. Connelly is the author of the Harry Bosch series. This was the first in a series featuring reporter Jack McEvoy. The premise and story are intriguing but the execution is long and drawn out. McEvoy's police detective twin brother commits suicide but McEvoy has a hard time believing it. His investigations turn up a series of other officer suicides all with connections to vicious murders being investigated by those officers. The suicide notes left by the officers all feature quotes from Edgar Allan Poe. McEvoy works with the FBI in finding the killer who has connections to a network of pedophiles. Of course, there is a love interest and an unexpected twist at the end. It just seemed as if the story would never end and I was ready for it to be done about 150 pages before it finally did. The audiobook was well narrated by Buck Schirner.

The Bluest Eye

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison  215 pp

I first read this book six years ago and this was what I had to say about it. My opinion hasn't really changed. It is a beautifully written depressing story.

The Hanging

The Hanging by Lotte Hammer & Søren Hammer  298 pp.

Two children arriving at school early one morning discover the gruesome remains of five men, mutilated and hanging by the neck from the gymnasium ceiling. Chief detective Konrad Simonson (frequently and confusingly referred to as Simon in the book). As the victims are slowly identified a connection between them is discovered and it appears their deaths were the result of brutal vigilante justice against pedophiles. The ones behind the murders launch a media campaign against Denmark's failure to investigate and prosecute child sexual abusers compounding the difficulties faced by the police. What seems at first to be a basic police procedural takes on a more complex nature as side plots intervene, some integral to the story and others not. I found this a slow read and I'm not sure if that is because it is a translation from Danish or just the story itself.

Never Mind

Never Mind  (the Patrick Melrose novels book one) by Edward St. Aubyn  208 pp.

I started on this pentalogy before tackling the Showtime series "Patrick Melrose" starring Benedict Cumberbatch. This first book was quite dull until about half way through. In it we are introduced to  Patrick Melrose, the child, who lives with his horrible parents. His father is abusive to both his wife and son, and anyone else he can get away with. Patrick's beloved mother is an alcoholic who drinks because her husband is so awful to her. She is clueless about the seriousness of the abuse to Patrick. The couple socializes with several equally messed up people who end up looking saint-like in comparison to Patrick's father. It is a scathing assailment on the European upper classe. Apparently this series is semi-autobiographical and St. Aubyn uses this volume to suggest a cause for Patrick's problems in adulthood.

The Nix

The Nix by Nathan Hill  625 pp.

According to this story, a Nix is a Norwegian house spirit who attaches itself to a person and follows them for life. It seems that Samuel Andresen-Anderson has more than one. There is his mother who left when he was a child but returns to his life after "attacking" a presidential candidate. There is the girl he fell in love with at first sight. And there is the disturbed friend who he could not save. This story of a writer whose life is falling apart in the present. There are flashes back to his childhood and to his mother's life in 1968 to provide the backstory of how he ended up in his current state. And there are the characters in the story, lots of them. Samuel's gamer friends, his mother's college friends, his father, his grandfather who tells a different story about his mother, his mother's lawyer, a vindictive cop turned lawyer and judge, the student who wants to get Samuel fired from his teaching position, the publisher who plans to sue him, the beautiful violinist, the childhood friend hiding a terrible secret, etc. There is the main story and then the side stories that all seem to connect in a myriad of ways. In spite of being invested in the story, I kept thinking "Is this ever going to end?" 

Flying in Place

Flying in Place by Susan Palwick (1992), 179 pages

When we first meet Emma, she's married with a small daughter. Her daughter had gotten into some of her papers before her husband could prevent it. The papers were letters that Emma had written to her older sister, Ginny, who had died at age 12, before Emma was born. Explaining the letters to her husband brings the story back to a time when Emma was experiencing her father's early morning visits to her bedroom.


Sworn to silence by her father, who told her that her mother would die if she knew, Emma is on her own. Her strategy for coping with her father's sexual abuse turns to out-of-body experiences. While hovering near the ceiling to avoid her father, she finds her dead sister there.

Meanwhile, the rest of Emma's life remains tough--her mother is a hard-nosed English teacher at Emma's middle school, and is critical of most people (including Emma), and Emma's father, in addition to being abusive, is an egotistic surgeon. It doesn't help that Emma's excess weight makes her feel insecure, feeling that she's always being compared not only to her peers, but to her dead sister, who was quite thin.

Emma's angst and wall-building makes it difficult for others in her life to sympathize with her, but it seems realistic for a child handling sexual abuse. I'm just not sure about the out-of-body experiences, though...