Bookshelves draw me like no other force.

After our first breakfast in Hong Kong last weekend, I walked to the bookshelf that faced the foot of the dining table. Bookshelves draw me like no other force. Browsing the titles, I found a lot of old friends that had opened worlds to me with just collections of their words- The God of Small Things (Arundhati Roy), Shantaram (Gregory David Roberts), to name a couple. But the book I walked away with was A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Afghan author Khaled Hosseini.

Earlier this summer, Hosseini broke my heart and shushed it, with The Kite Runner. I had bought the book during my first visit to Second Story Books, in the area I lived in for three weeks in D.C., Dupont Circle. (With just two visits, Second Story Books quite easily became one of my favorite bookstores on the planet – they not only sell second hand books of recent titles, but tons of wonderful old stuff, first editions even.) At the prompting of my friend Sarah, I bought The Kite Runner. It did not disappoint, as I gave myself wholeheartedly to the journey and the characters that lived it. I would be reading on my bed when I’d put down the book, sigh and look over at my roommate with a little sadness in my eyes. “My heart!!” I’d softly cry out. So much pain, so much grit, is shared so truthfully, so beautifully, in the lines of some books.

I’ve read a handful of sad stories this summer. One of my brothers wonders why I do this to myself and how little my intake of melancholy, emotional stories seems to be reflected in my daily disposition. The latter is a good thing, I think. I won’t even address the former. Now, back to the book I picked up. Over the four short days I got to spend in Hong Kong, I slowly devoured the book (in between being all touristy), and more eagerly during the last two days when I was really getting caught up in the story. In my heart I was furiously rooting for Laila, falling ridiculously in love with Tariq (“I only have eyes for you..”), reaching out to Mariam, hating the wretched husband (whose name escapes me at the moment) and mourning the continuous loss and grief that have been nothing less than relentless from page one. Like The Kite Runner, the book’s journey begins with children, but it also begins with scarring, the kind of scarring born from fierce, unforgiving wounds that have closed up but never, despite the passing of time, healed. I imagine some of the children I know and have worked with, and wonder how they must painfully bear the same.

“There are a lot of children in Afghanistan, but little childhood.”

— Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)

I haven’t finished the book. I had less than a hundered pages to go, but we were leaving for the airport already and I had to return the book to its spot on the bookshelf. That was Tuesday. It’s already Friday, and Laila and Tariq (of the book) still swim in and out of my consciousness, as they have since I became a witness to their love. I left the book at a moment that is both hopeful and heartbreaking. What, I wonder, eventually happens to them? I tell my friend, Eric, about this cliffhanging experience I’m having with this book, and he jokingly offers to look up the ending on Wikipedia and write it up for me. I violently refuse his offer (as violently as you can refuse in chat form) and tell him that my anger is rising. (Haha!) So if you’ve read the book, don’t you dare bring it up to me until I’ve finished it!

Have you ever read the trilogy – His Dark Materials, by Philip Pullman? You may know the movie version of the first book, the Golden Compass, which I don’t quite recommend; the movie, not the book, that is. The casting and performance completely ruined the imagery that had unfolded in my mind when I enjoyed all three books. I spent hours resolving things in my mind after I saw the film. I bring up the trilogy because, like with any moving book (or books), I completely fell for the characters, holding their own hopes in my own heart and hands, even for just a few moments. Like my brother Lawrence, who was the one who bought the trilogy and urged me to read them; I still think of them. I still think of the people of the books, I still think of Will and Lyra – their heartbreak that was somehow made whole in the acceptance of their fate; and their devotion to each other that simply never surrendered to separation, a separation formed beyond our ordinary understanding of distance and time.

That is kind of how I’m feeling about A Thousand Splendid Suns. I cannot wait to finish it, but right now I ignore the faint dampening of fear and  I allow myself to sit gently in a pocket of hope; hope that somehow the closure of this book will be sweet, that in the final pages there will be redemption (as there was in The Kite Runner), that the words will run out, but the characters live on, in my head and somewhere else out there.