The initial interest in the book clearly lay in the promise that it might deliver topical information in an accessible manner-humanizing the newspaper accounts of a place that suddenly became a U.S. So here’s the mystery: Why have Americans, who traditionally avoid foreign literature like the plague, made The Kite Runner into a cultural touchstone? What version of life abroad is it that seems so palatable and approachable to us? Why The Kite Runner and not any of the other books about Afghanistan that have recently hit the shelves? Laura Bush called it “really great.” As the months have passed, America has only grown more passionate about its merits. Scores of municipalities selected it for their Community Reads programs, citing its “universal” themes. The Kite Runner has sold an astonishing 1.25 million copies in paperback, driven by word-of-mouth at a moment when sales of fiction are reportedly at a low. The novel seemed eminently worthy, after all-not only the first one written in English by an Afghan, but chock-full of “eye-opening information about the turmoil in modern-day Afghanistan,” as one reader put it. Do I really have to read The Kite Runner? That was the question asked in the Slate offices this spring when the debut novel by Afghan-American Khaled Hosseini hit the top of the New York Times best-seller list.
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