Books I Enjoyed Reading a Year Ago

No book review today, my reading's not going brilliantly...instead, here are three books that I read many months ago.

Albert Camus - The Plague

An area that was once full of people is now unsettlingly quiet, almost unnatural. The trams now run largely empty, the train station has been closed. People are cooped up inside and won't walk out, if only to not spread the plague that's infected the town. It's all rather unusual, perhaps absurd...but that desire to be human, to see others, persists.

Perhaps Camus' novel, unfairly in the shadow of books such as The Stranger, could be viewed today as rather similar to the lockdowns that occurred a few years ago. Some might even claim it's prophetic. But at the same time, the idea of a plague infecting a town such as Oran isn't at the heart of the novel. Rather, the focus is on the people and their circumstances that are affected by the plague - the desire to see loved ones, to escape. It's definitely not a medical book, more a philosophical one. My copy describes The Plague as a "depiction of resistance against a seemingly uncontrollable evil", which somewhat suits the book well - how people have to come to terms with something they cannot control, merely hope it comes to an end. 

Graham Greene - Brighton Rock

Graham Greene might be one of my favourite authors through how he's able to paint moral issues through the characters he creates. Brighton Rock is one of my favourite books due to how no character is truly perfect, with the backdrop of an otherwise quaint town muddied by the acts of gang members such as Pinkie.

I remember picking up Brighton Rock as part of a school task, initially fascinated by the cover which featured angular-shaped characters in a field. It was the cover of the Windmill Books edition, which is why the picture of the book cover that I have features a tool of some kind - one I find rather dull and not representative of what the book is actually like. When reading Brighton Rock, I was rather confused, frustrated even, by how Greene's writing was almost too lucid, punctuated by colons and with unusual metaphors such as "but a table owned you too - by your fingerprints". However, my appreciation for Greene's writing improved after reading about him and how the book's plot was influenced by his Catholic views, it being also about judgement in a way. I was only happy to go out and get more by Greene such as the excellent The Power and the Glory, and I bought another one of his books when visiting a place I'll blog about in the future. 

Either way, Brighton Rock is one of those complex books that is both unusual yet brilliant at the same time, one which can confuse and enlighten someone. This is certainly a book to not miss.

Khaled Hosseini - A Thousand Splendid Suns

This book's different in that it's a more modern book, having been first published in 2007, whereas the previous two were published around the time of the Second World War. It's also different by that of its content, it being more focused on the various wars that have ravaged Afghanistan since 1977 and that continue to affect the country to this day.

In a way, Hosseini already had and continues to touch on the effect of the wars in Afghanistan in his books - his first novel, The Kite Runner, focused on the life of a boy and how it changed following the Soviet invasion in 1979. A Thousand Splendid Suns is somewhat different in that it focuses on two protagonists, both women, and that it goes right up to and past the US invasion following 9/11. And every word that Hosseini writes can truly be devastating - the characters never truly find any hope, and whilst this can get extremely sorrowful, the harrowing picture that Hosseini creates is one that could cause any reader to be angry about Mariam and Laila's (the protagonists) experiences. The book is one that shows how Afghanistan during peace was filled with optimism, one where war can cause a nation to crumble and where most victims are only recognised as pictures in newspapers trying to escape the violence. 

Ultimately, as the title suggests, Afghanistan is a beautiful country, sadly corrupted by nearly fifty years of war. This is definitely a book to read if you're interested in this kind of literature.