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Completed	November 2010
Title	A Thousand Splendid Suns
Author	Khaled Hosseini
Published	2007
Quote	"One day that same month of June, Giti was walking home from school with two classmates. Only three blocks from Giti's house, a stray rocket struck the girls. Later that terrible day, Laila learned that Nila, Giti's mother, had run up and down the street where Giti was killed, collecting pieces of her daughter's flesh in an apron, screeching hysterically. Giti's decomposing right foot, still in its nylon sock and purple sneaker, would be found on a rooftop two weeks later."
Review	If ever there were a case against pre-marital sex, this book is it. How many female characters in this book had flippant fun willy-nilly, got knocked up, surprise surprise, and quickly saw their Life Options disintegrate till they were living in a prison of their own bad decisions? This book tells the pathetic tale of Mariam who is wed off at fifteen to a man thirty years her senior, living in Kabul. They're married for twenty years, no children. He's a jerk. She's unhappy. Not a great situation. Then along comes fifteen-year-old Laila, who is knocked up, surprise surprise. Laila marries said jerk, so now he's got two wives. Long story, but Mariam ends up killing the husband. The author, who also wrote The Kite Runner, which I will not be reading, does a pretty good job with the interesting descriptions of Kabul and wartime, such as this: "This, Laila had known, would be the first risky part, finding a man suitable to pose with them as a family member. The freedoms and opportunities that women had enjoyed between 1978 and 1992 were a thing of the past now----Laila could still remember Babi saying of those years of communist rule, It's good time to be a woman in Afghanistan, Laila. Since the Mujahideen takeover in April 1992, Afghanistan's name had been changed to the Islamic State of Afghanistan. The Supreme Court under Rabbani was filled now with hardliner mullahs who did away with the communist-era decrees that empowered women and instead passed rulings based on Shari'a, strict Islamic laws that ordered women to cover, forbade their travel without a male relative, punished adultery with stoning. Even if the actual enforcement of these laws was sporadic at best. But they'd enforce them on us more, Laila had said to Mariam, if they weren't so busy killing each other. And us. "The second risky part of this trip would come when they actually arrived in Pakistan. Already burdened with nearly two million Afghan refugees, Pakistan had closed its borders to Afghans in January of that year. Laila had heard that only those with visas would be admitted. But the border was porous----always had been-----and Laila knew that thousands of Afghans were still crossing into Pakistan either with bribes or by proving humanitarian grounds----and there were always smugglers who could be hired."

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