February- A Misjudged Country

A Thousand Splendid Suns is without a doubt one of the best books I have ever read. Reading it made me realize just how uninformed I am about things outside of my own individual world. It feels like I would have to read it about ten more times to be able to fully take in everything that it was saying. To me, both of these are signs of a really incredible book. In America today I believe that we have a pretty distorted view of what life in Afghanistan is really like. It's not that we have no reason for thinking these things with all of the violence that has occurred between the United States and Afghanistan, but A Thousand Splendid Suns has opened my eyes to the fact that the entire country is not like that. Laila and Mariam show that so many innocent people in that country get grouped in with the generalized idea that everyone is Afghanistan is so violent and terrible. While obviously this book is fiction, I would find it hard to believe that it doesn't hold a lot of truth in it. Throughout the novel I think that Hosseini sort of presents the stereotypes that many people have in their mind about Afghanistan and he presents them in comparison to the innocent, good people that he knows exist there. For example Rasheed in comparison to Tariq. Rasheed shows the abusive, misogynistic male that  people believe are all that exist in a country like Afghanistan while Tariq is the innocent, kind man that really does exist there but no one knows about. Through tjis novel, Khaled Hosseini successfully presents and informs about the different, innocent people who live in Afghanistan and have nothing to do with the violence. After reading this, I know that I definitely feel much more informed about life over there and appreciate that he was able to educate so many uninformed people on the truth about a misrepresented country.