It's time for: an intense experience

I picked up this book from the library yesterday. I read the author's first novel, Kite Runner, a few years ago. He is an amazing writer but the plot was very hard to handle emotionally for me. It left me heartbroken and despondent the entire time I was reading. I experienced grief and hopelessness as if the events were really happening in front of me. That is a mark of a great storyteller. I never wanted to experience that again but......here I go. On the cover, this book is proclaimed as "the saddest story yet". Great, wish me luck.



I read about 100 pages yesterday and I've been sad but I'm still able to put the story in perspective (as in,....fictional). I have a feeling that I'll be in trouble (deep empathy) when the Taliban comes into power. Why do I do this to myself?
Here's some information if you think you'd like to read this novel as well. Experience it with me if you will.


From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A Thousand Splendid Suns is a 2007 novel by Afghan author Khaled Hosseini, his second, following his bestselling 2003 debut, The Kite Runner. It focuses on the tumultuous lives of two Afghan women and how their lives cross each other, spanning from the 1960s to 2003. The book was released on May 22, 2007, and received favorable prepublication reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and Booklist, as well as reaching #2 on Amazon.com's bestseller list before its release.
The title of the book comes from a line in the Josephine Davis translation of the poem "Kabul", by the 17th-century Iranian poet Saib-e-Tabrizi:

Every street of Kabul is enthralling to the eye
Through the bazaars, caravans of Egypt pass
One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs
And the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls


Time magazine's Lev Grossman placed it at number three in the Top 10 Fiction Books of 2007, and praised it as a "dense, rich, pressure-packed guide to enduring the unendurable". Jonathan Yardley said in the Washington Post "Book World": "Just in case you're wondering whether Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns is as good as The Kite Runner, here's the answer: No. It's better."


^{A Thousand Splendid Suns is a breathtaking story set against the volatile events of Afghanistan’s last thirty years—from the Soviet invasion to the reign of the Taliban to the post-Taliban rebuilding—that puts the violence, fear, hope, and faith of this country in intimate, human terms. It is a tale of two generations of characters brought jarringly together by the tragic sweep of war, where personal lives—the struggle to survive, raise a family, find happiness—are inextricable from the history playing out around them. http://www.khaledhosseini.com/hosseini-books-splendidsuns.html}