And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini
There’s an insurmountable amount of both joy and devastation in how many books there are in the world and how many great books I am yet to read. And, really, you have to kiss some toads and frogs on the journey to them. I read Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns in 2017 and The Kite Runner in 2020 and the former immediately cemented him as an auto read author in my books. I cannot give any explanation for the delay in reading And the Mountains Echoed, but I am very happy I didn’t read it until now — I think I can appreciate the skill better. Khaled doesn’t introduce you to a character or a setting. There’s no talking stage. No starter. You plunge straight into the meat and dessert with the familiarity of a third book in a trilogy, even though you’ve never met any of the characters before. One second you haven’t started the book, the next you’re deep in Shadbagh — an Afghan city that doesn’t even exist! You hardly even know whose pov you’re reading f...