What Not To Read: The Kite Runner

This is another infamous 3 for 2 classic - by which I mean it never leaves the Waterstone's pyramided tables - which one is constantly told, "Oh, you must read it, it's wonderful, you'll cry all the way through..." So, heeding said advice, I read it.

I'm sighing as I write this, as I fear I'll come across as someone who just hates anything populist, but I really didn't enjoy this book. It has no great literary merit that I can fathom; it fulfils all the criteria of a novel - it tells a story, lots happens, it has good characters and bad characters and good characters that do bad things and must atone - but there is nothing in its style or structure that I find interesting, and that a book "will make me cry" is not, alas, my first consideration when selecting a novel. I became vaguely interested at the point the Taliban take over, hoping in vain that I might be given some insight into the Taliban mindset; instead, I was fed a stereotypical Boys-Own-Adventure 'bad guy' - who rapes children, just in case his publicly stoning a man to death hadn't convinced us of his evil - whose two-dimensionality is patronising in the extreme, to both the Afghan people and the reader.

The catalogue of appalling events that befall our hero eventually became so numerous, so commonplace, so frequent that at last the well of my suspension of disbelief ran completely dry; The Kite Runner is, I'm afraid, little more than a fictional misery memoir.

What Not To Read: Shadow of the Wind

I have friends who will swear this is the best book of the last however-many years, and who claim it stayed with them for months after reading, was unputdownable yadda yadda yadda. I hate to be the dissenter, but this is surely a case of the Emporer's New Clothes: Shadow of the Wind is not any of those things, and I fail to see its appeal. It's so plot-driven and frenetic that the characters have no room or time to develop and grow; they remain little more than names on the page, hardly fleshed out at all. The Barcelona of the story comes across much as the village in Milly Molly Mandy, a series of houses and shops that the characters wander between, experiencing a mini-adventure at each new destination; the map at the front does little to disuade me from the MMM comparison. I found the narrative wholly implausible, even within the world of the book, and by halfway through, I was desperate for the whole saga to end and release me. I love Gothic and I enjoy a twisting tale, but this, despite its enigmatic title, is in fact a poor shadow of both.