#khalid hosseini

[youstillsaiditsname]

i think i loved you, but i guess i'll never really know

joan tierney / death cab for cutie / sylvie baumgartel / the crane wives / @araekni / khalid hosseini / lev st valentine / wendy cope / richard siken (reordered)

[suheib]

“ I was like a patient who cannot tell the doctors where it hurts, only that it does.”

-Khalid Hosseini

[amarmonerkotha]

Haven't finished "a thousand splendid suns" yet but the book definitely finished me

[luckystarinsky]

When Khaled Hosseini wrote “a man's heart is a wretched, wretched thing. It isn't likes a mother's womb. It won't bleed. It won't stretch to make room for you.” And when he wrote “Learn this once and learn it well, my daughter. Like a compass needle always points north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman.”

[justadeadpoet]

"Everybody wants Jack," Laila said to Mariam. "That's what it is. Everybody wants Jack to rescue them from disaster. But there is no Jack. Jack is not coming back. Jack is dead"

~ A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khalid Hosseini

[shawredasar]

~Khalid Husseini, The Kite Runner

[cloudyjulyy]

Time can be a greedy thing-sometimes it steals all d details for itself.

-Kite Runner

[musepoemsposts]

[sillytriumphdragon]

I tell myself I am searching for something. But more and more, it feels like I am wandering, waiting for something to happen to me, something that will change everything, something that my whole life has been leading up to. ~Khaled Hosseini

(Book: And the Mountains Echoed [ad])

(Art: 'Christina Olson', 1947 by Andrew Wyeth)

[girlinaswing]

My Bookish World Tour- ASIA

12 done and 38 to go… YemenChinaSouth Korea JapanPhilippinesTajikistanUzbekistanKazakhstanKyrgyzstanNorth KoreaMalaysiaThailandMyanmarNepalBangladeshPakistanAfghanistanJordanCambodiaLaosVietnamTurkmenistanSri LankaIndonesiaBruneiArmeniaHong KongAzerbaijanBahrainCyprusEast TimorPalestineIranMaldivesTimor-LesteLebanonIraqSaudi ArabiaGeorgiaBhutanSingaporeIsraelKuwaitQatarOmanSyriaUnited Arab…

[sin-scape]

Sea Prayer, by Khaled Hosseini, illustrated by Dan Williams.

[murda-bona]

Haven’t read a solid book in about a month. Been digging deep into my comic collection. So I decided to look in my library and read “The Kite Runner” again. Only read it once, but I do remember it made me cry. Can’t remember which part, but I guess I’m going to find out 😂

[wonkyreads]

I used to write reviews here instead of just Goodreads. I’m hoping to going back to that, but to be honest, I moved last year and don’t have space for my books. This means I stopped taking pictures for the BPCs, so I stopped taking pictures of my recent reads, so posting here felt pointless. I like ranting here, though. Next year, I will attempt to keep that up.

For this year, take an end of the year top worst and best. (And keep in mind these are obviously just my opinions! This list also doesn’t reflect the books I DNF’d because I don’t consider them read personally.)

Top 10 Worst Reads of 2022

10. The Themis Files by Sylvain Neuvel

- So this is a sci-fi trilogy where a girl accidentally discovers a giant mecha hand buried deep underground and grows up to be a scientist and studies/digs up all of these mecha pieces. The first book is genuinely good, but the arguments and plot lines the author decided to take with the rest of the series progressively pissed me off more and more, though. Not a bad series, just ultimately not one I enjoyed.

9. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

- I feel I’m gonna piss a fair amount of people off with this one, but it won’t be the last time in this list. With how popular this book is online I don’t feel the need to explain what the plot here is. The writing of this book was beautiful, definitely, it was the content I couldn’t stand. I’m a fan of angst. This was not angst. This was throwing a shelf’s worth of terrible things into a sack and shaking it up to see what happened. This was actively attempting to make people feel things in a way that felt so over the top and transparent that I found myself hardly caring at all. To me, this reeks of romanticizing queer trauma and just trauma in general. I’m just not here for it. Show me redemption or healing, they’re harder to write anyway since it seemed all Yanagihara cared about was the mechanics behind the story and not the story itself.

8. The Kite Runner by Khalid Hosseini

- This book is kind of a modern classic and it’s just… I’m not sure how I was supposed to sympathize with the main character. This is the story of Amir and Hassan, two boys in Afghanistan in the 70’s. Hassan’s father works for Amir’s, but the book spends a large amount of time trying to guilt you into feeling bad for Amir, our main character. That’s kind of the whole plot (without spoilers) as I remember it if I’m being honest. The writing was fine and I’ve liked Hosseini’s books in the past, I just disliked the main character so much it kind of ruined everything. I disliked feeling guilty for not liking him. It all kind of got in the way of the message for me.

7. The Bodyguard by Katherine Center

- Hannah’s a bodyguard and Jake’s a down-to-earth movie star who seems to have a stalker problem. I adore the concept, but I think my main problem with this book is that I hyped it up for myself and told myself I’d love it. That and the premise felt like a promise of some kind of danger and by the time anything actually dangerous happened it was so ridiculous I laughed at it. It’s the over-the-top kind of romance I tend to not like, though. I fully admit to skimming the epilogue because I also kind of hate romance novels that do that.

6. We Are the Brennans by Tracey Lange

- Sunday Brennan gets into a drunk driving accident and then must swallow her pride and move back to New York where her large Irish Catholic family pretends they don’t need her either. This book is about family secrets, but all I really remember about it is that it did this really bad, gimmicky thing where every chapter ended with the same exact sentence, usually dialogue, that the next chapter began with. When it’s done a couple times to show that we’re in the same scene we just left only in a different perspective, or better yet the two perspectives don’t hear the dialogue the same way, it’s fine. But it was every single chapter. Every one of them. I’m also super picky about domestic drama books like this. Hard pass for me.

5. A History of Wild Places by Shae Earnshaw

- Honestly, I’m not sure how to some this up without spoilers so I’ll just say it’s a cult-y mystery told in multiple time lines. This is the second book I’ve read by Earnshaw and both were promising starts with disappointing developments for me. For me, the book was too predictable to be satisfying and, worse, often it felt like the most boring option was constantly being chosen. The concept was originally very promising, but the closer I got to the end and realized the twist wasn’t going to be fun or interesting, the more reading the book started to feel like a chore.

4. There’s Someone Inside Your House by Stephanie Perkins

- Oof. I don’t know how I picked this book up and didn’t expect it to be a teen slasher. I’ll watch a slasher any day of the week (including the movie made from this book), but reading them is kind of boring. You know the tropes, so when they’re followed it’s anticlimactic. I also found some of the character interactions hard to believe, which didn’t help raise my opinion any. I’m just harsh on thrillers and any books involving “small towns.”

3. Summer Sons by Lee Mandelo

- When his BFF Eddie, and definitely not his boyfriend, dies of apparent suicide, Andrew moves into Eddie’s old house with Eddie’s friends to find proof that Eddie’d been killed. There’s also some supernatural stuff and dark academia themes. This is another opinion I feel will make enemies, and it’s one I’ve actually posted here before. I read this book so early in the year that I’ve forgotten most of the specifics about it. What I remember disliking the most, though, was along the same lines as A Little Life. So much felt like it was just there to romanticize queer pain and what was left outside of that was a disappointingly slow mystery that didn’t really surprise or scare me. I think the conversations this book attempted to have were interesting, I just also think it failed to pull it all off. I didn’t believe or feel these characters. I didn’t care for how much it read like Ronan (of The Raven Boys) fanfic. I was consistently annoyed with smart characters avoiding the plot line or making idiotic choices. Also, I’m still traumatized by how obsessed literally everyone was with Eddie, I’m genuinely avoiding books using that name now. All around, absolutely wasn’t for me.

2. Dating Dr. Dil by Nisha Sharma

- Romance is not my genre. Romance that is so over-the-top crazy unrealistic is super not my genre. This book follows Kareena and Dr. Dil in a retelling of The Taming of the Shrew. Kareena is supposed to get married before her younger sister and her family is pressuring her, also her dad is selling her childhood home. Dr. Dil hosts a TV show and wants to raise money for his community clinic. I disliked Dr. Dil so, so much and Kareena was so inconsistent. The book felt so unedited and contradictory that I was constantly annoyed with it. The balance between show and tell was nonexistent; you can’t tell me what these characters are and not back it up and expect me to like them or believe them. People’s reactions were crazy over-the-top sometimes and if I have to ask of people actually act like that in real life, I’m already frustrated. I adore The Taming of the Shrew. I could watch 10 Things I Hate About You on repeat. I wanted to love this book so, so badly and was so utterly disappointed in what I got.

And last, but certainly least:

1. Verity by Colleen Hoover

- Verity was one of my most recent reads (I, regrettably, listened to it while icing sugar cookies for Christmas) and it follows Lowen attempting to write the end to a book series she’s never read before by snooping through the original authors memoir manuscripts. Or something. I have never read a Colleen Hoover book before and bought this one through audible years ago because everyone seemed to love it so much. This book has a 4.4 rating on Goodreads. I would just like to know how. Honestly. Talk about unbelievable characters! There were so many unnecessary gratuitous sex scenes in this book and just.. laughable suspense. A lot of the “twists” in this book were so predictable, but I do have a few questions; namely, how the fuck did Jeremy’s milquetoast ass get two women to become so obsessed with him so fast? Also, do people actually think like Lowen does? Holy shit. No really, I have SO many questions and I’m fairly certain none of them are the kind Hoover intended for me to have. I could go on for hours but I’m attempting to avoid spoilers and also it’s a fairly loved book and I don’t want to verge into the territory of yucking someone’s yum or anything, I just genuinely don’t understand. 4.4! Jesus Christ!

[amarmonerkotha]

Asked my teacher for the book "A thousand splendid suns" to read and she so readily agreed to let me borrow ittt!!

[justadeadpoet]

Like an art lover running out of a burning museum, she would grab whatever she could - a look, a whisper --- to salvage from perishing, to preserve. But time is the most unforgiving of fires, and she couldn't, in the end, save it all.

~ Khalid Hosseini - A Thousand Splendid Suns

[not2menotifitsyou]

Khalid Hosseini // @8-bitfiction // Anne Sexton