Wow.
Just, wow.
I loved this book, as hard as parts of it were to read. It's very well-written and takes you inside Afghanistan before and during the rule of the Taliban - a world few Westerners have seen or understand. It follows the life of Amir, a privileged youth who, with his father, flees Afghanistan when Russia invades. They emigrate to the United States, where Amir builds a new life and buries his past. But the past has a way of catching up with you, as it does with Amir, and he returns to Afghanistan to confront it and to find a way to be good again.
It's a breathtaking novel, and impossible to put down.
Monday, February 25, 2008
Monday, February 18, 2008
His Dark Materials
I just finished Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy and I've gotta say I loved it. I think I may like it even more than the Harry Potter series, simply because it was a richer, more dimensional read. Both the books' content and their prose were on par with novels directed at an older audience, where the HP series was ... not pedantic, but just not of the same ilk.
The characters in Pullman's books were very well developed and believable; they are people you'd like to know. Well, most of them, anyways. It did take me a little while to get into the first book: it takes place in another world, one like ours but different, and the phraseology took a little getting used to. But once I was immersed in the setting and the verbiage, I was hooked.
The first book introduces us to Lyra Belacqua, who is being raised by the scholars at Jordan College, in Oxford. But we soon realize that Lyra's Oxford differs from our own, and we are introduced to a world that is both parallel and divergent at once. It is in this world, and several others, that this engrossing and addicting trilogy takes place. We meet witches, humans, angels, daemons, ghosts and armored bears as we traverse these worlds and discover the secrets of Dust and witness struggle to defeat The Authority.
Controversy surrounds His Dark Materials because of the author's Atheism and own words: "My books are about killing God." The theology, physics and philosophy of these books, however, are so well-written they transcend controversy. Read these books - you will not be disappointed.
The characters in Pullman's books were very well developed and believable; they are people you'd like to know. Well, most of them, anyways. It did take me a little while to get into the first book: it takes place in another world, one like ours but different, and the phraseology took a little getting used to. But once I was immersed in the setting and the verbiage, I was hooked.
The first book introduces us to Lyra Belacqua, who is being raised by the scholars at Jordan College, in Oxford. But we soon realize that Lyra's Oxford differs from our own, and we are introduced to a world that is both parallel and divergent at once. It is in this world, and several others, that this engrossing and addicting trilogy takes place. We meet witches, humans, angels, daemons, ghosts and armored bears as we traverse these worlds and discover the secrets of Dust and witness struggle to defeat The Authority.
Controversy surrounds His Dark Materials because of the author's Atheism and own words: "My books are about killing God." The theology, physics and philosophy of these books, however, are so well-written they transcend controversy. Read these books - you will not be disappointed.
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