The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini, will be the first book up for discussion in the book club.

This thread will be closed after this post, and reopened for discussion in two weeks- on 11/20- to begin the discussion.

If anyone believes that we should begin it sooner, or later, please PM me.

In any case, Happy reading!


Edited to add the AMAZON link:

Amazon.com: The Kite Runner: Books: Khaled ...

This thread is now open for discussion.

MY suggestion is to discuss chapter one and two together because of the length of the first chapter.

I'll come back later today with my opinion.

I'm waiting for others to start. I don't want to commit a spoiler faux paux.

One of the things that strikes me while reading is the amount of irony (which, of course, you don't realize until you've read further).

I'm loving it...though I'm reading it before bed, so I'm not getting along as fast as I would like.

Okay, I'll throw out a few thoughts....


Carrying a memory of the past that the bearer would like to have done differently is a common experience, from what I have seen in people. It's universally human. Not many people have 'A way to be good again' as was mentioned in the book, but I think that most people would find themselves considering their whole life experience all over again when offered such an opportunity.

Amir says that he became what he is today at the age of 12. I disagree. (Without including any spoilers.) I think that how he FELT about himself was defined in 1975, but who he WAS was a result of the culture and upbringing that he had.

As we see evidence of in chap. 2, he was emotionally alone even though he had a clearly privileged household. His mother is dead, and his father seems to spend little time with him. That would make ANY child develop a complex that will affect his/her behavior. Hassan, his servant/playmate must have seemed much more privileged to him; or at least I would think so.

Hassan and his father put up with a lot of abuse because of their ethnicity. It makes me think of pre-1960's America and the situation with ethnic minorities here. Though I will admit that the concept of being so banal while talking to a child, as the soldier was, steps beyond disgusting to me. In this country, people have done such because they could get away with it... I guess that this is a trait that is not limited to one particular culture.

I INHALED the book in a few days. I couldn't put it down.

If you think that you are about to throw out a spoiler, just skim the chapter and see if that thought has been touched on yet at that point in the story.

I don't know about that.

Although he seems to have a certain emotional dependency on Hassan, he also has a healthy dose of superiority.

I noticed that too...the clear superiority he exhibits in the way he interacts with Hassan.

Don't get too far ahead in the story guys... Right now we are on Ch 1 and 2.

That superiority would be a function of cultural influence. That's why I compared it to pre-1960's America. It was the general cultural belief that different ethnicities had their 'place.'

Initially, it looks much more like a dominant boy and a submissive boy as playmates.

Yeah but he exhibits blatant jealousy too. Jealousy of how both his very own father and Hassan's father treat Hassan.

oops we are only discussing ch 1-2 thus far. What's that? Like 10 pages? I guess the jealousy isn't evident by ch. 2. However I will say that there is talk of brotherhood from feeding from the same breast and you get the general gist that the two boys, while having very different stations so to speak in life, have lives that are very similar. Baba hired the same women to breastfeed both boys, neither boy has a mother, both fathers seem to take part in the raising of both boys, Ali seems to discipline both boys, and the boys spend most of their freetime playing with each other. In the scope of the first 2 ch. it almost seems irrelevant that one child is a servant child while the other is priviledged. At the end of the day one kid sleeps in a palace like house while the other sleeps in a bare shack. But other than that their lives seem pretty entwined and more similar than different.