The kite runner

Just finished Khaled Hosseinis' book 'The Kite Runner' about a boy of privilege growing up in Afganistan in the '70s before the Soviet invasion, the Taleban and the American invasion. His friendship with a servant boy highlights the intractible nature of the class and religious system which has led to the excesses of the Taleban but also gives a brutally honest account of how a societys' rules get handed down and ingrained in the children.
The title comes from the sport of kite fighting where opponents try to cut each others string and the 'runner' searches for the defeated kite and brings it back as a trophy and the author paints a picture of the beautiful city of Kabul brought to ruin by the time of his subsequent return from the USA as an adult.
For most of the book I thought Hosseini was telling his own story and felt a little cheated (why? because truth is stranger than fiction?) when I found out he wasn't but it's a stunning story, well written and worth reading.

Books and Memory

Books have been part of my life for as long as I can remember and of course age changes the remembering. When I was 30 I could remember what I had for lunch at my Grandmothers when I was 7, at 40 pre teen years were gone and of the teenage years only the catastrophic remained, Elizabeth Mason, pimples, The Graduate, Bob Dylan, Elizabeth Mason (and it wasn't the girl anymore only the memory that it mattered!).. Now yesterdays lunch is a problem! My father wasn't a great talker but he was a great reader and I tried hard to read his Great Books but Plato and Euclid and Kant were couched in this old fashioned difficult language and it wasn't until I met the philosophers through Bertrand Russels' History of Western Philosophy that I realised I needed an interpreter who understood the big ideas and could couch them in laymans terms. Like Henry Miller, a bit of philosophy, a lot of sex, a bit of philosophy etc. much more palatable.
At first I could remember everything, title, author, publisher, colour of the jacket and even cheap thrillers I only had to read the first page to know I had read it before. Now I'm almost finished before I realise it is familiar!
However there are advantages. I am visiting my old books and I know I have read them and remember how they affected me but not why. So the words are new but the ideas aren't and in 40 years I've changed so I view the ideas differently. I'm excited. My dear mother in her late Altzeimer years would visit with a book and every hour or so would pick it up and read the same page. Imagine that. What you could do is find the most provoking, life changing page in your reading history and put it aside to enjoy again and again.
What am I reading? 'The Heart is a Lonely Hunter', Bruce Chatwins 'In Patagonia', E.E. Schumachers 'Small is Beautiful', 'Catch 22' and poetry by Gerald Manley Hopkins and our own James K Baxter.
Five shelves to go, by the time I'm finished the memory will be diminished further and I'll be able to start again. What a saving!