Looking for Books

Here is the first edition of Looking for Books, a new semi-regular feature of HWAW intended to help you sift through new reading options.

For this edition, the selections focus on the Muslim world.

Hardback: The Reluctant Fundamentalist, by Mohsin Hamid

This is a book that pivots on a smile. A third of the way through Mohsin Hamid’s second novel, “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” the narrator, a young Pakistani man named Changez, tells an American how he first learned of the destruction of the World Trade Center. While on a business trip to Manila, he turned on the television in his hotel room and saw the towers fall. “I stared as one — and then the other — of the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center collapsed. And then I smiled. Yes, despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased.”

The novel begins a few years after 9/11. Changez happens upon the American in Lahore, invites him to tea and tells him the story of his life in the months just before and after the attacks. That monologue is the substance of Hamid’s elegant and chilling little novel

Read on for a full review.

Paperback: The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini

This powerful first novel, by an Afghan physician now living in California, tells a story of fierce cruelty and fierce yet redeeming love. Both transform the life of Amir, Khaled Hosseini's privileged young narrator, who comes of age during the last peaceful days of the monarchy, just before his country's revolution and its invasion by Russian forces.

But political events, even as dramatic as the ones that are presented in ''The Kite Runner,'' are only a part of this story. A more personal plot, arising from Amir's close friendship with Hassan, the son of his father's servant, turns out to be the thread that ties the book together. The fragility of this relationship, symbolized by the kites the boys fly together, is tested as they watch their old way of life disappear.

Read on for a full review.