March 2021

Did not spark any enjoyment-★☆☆☆☆

Okay-★★☆☆☆

Entertaining-★★★☆☆

Incredible-★★★★☆

Life-Changing-★★★★★


Reading Rate: 10.58 Pages/Day

Reflection

This month, I am honestly not very impressed with my reading rate. My reading rate is much shorter than last month’s and I believe a lot of factors made a big role in that. The only book that I had to manage to read was, “A Thousand Splendid Suns”. I made goals that seemed achievable, but I was not able to accomplish them, which is a novel that I have already read before in the past. I found myself pulling back from the novels I was reading, and often found myself struggling to pull myself back, possibly because I may not have found the book too interesting, or because it did not interest me as much as it did the first time reading the book. My goal is to try to accomplish my goals from last month. I still want to read the poetry book called, ” Home Body”, by Rupi Kaur. I enjoy reading her poetry books, so I believe that this will bring me back to reading more books. I also want to reread my favourite novel of all time called, ‘ where the Crawdads Sings”, which is a novel that I recommend to all. A new novel that I want to read is possible, “The Glass Castle”, as it is a memoir, which is what we have been focusing deeply on in our creative writing class.


The Books that I have Read this Month:

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini (275 pages)- ★★★★★


A Thousand Splendid Suns.gifA Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

As mentioned before, this is a novel that I have already read in the past; however, I was still as captivated, like I was reading it again for the first time. The novel is set in Afghanistan from the early 1960s to the early 2000s. Many of the characters were truly fascinating, but one character that really bought my attention was Mariam. I would say that her character development was quite phenomenal, and many of the things that she does in the novel are very unexpected. I also admired Laila in this novel, as she shares many of the same characteristics as Mariam. The only main difference between the both of them is that Laila is able to bear children while Mariam can not. A character that really disgusts me, is Rasheed who is a widowed shoemaker and takes Mariam and Laila to be his wife at two different times. There is also a major age difference between the two women who he marries. The main reason I dislike this character due to his abusive nature; and, many times I wanted these women to speak up but because of the generation and location that it was set in, I knew that it was not possible. I often felt empathetic towards both Mariam and Laila, and put myself in their own shoes, to see through their perspective. It was quite easy to do this, as the author did a great job trying to convey imagery throughout the novel. Sometimes I had a hard time grasping the information because it just felt unbelievable. This was what made the novel so great because of its unexpected twists and turns, and suspenseful chapters with cliffhangers at the end.

Again, I would say that this was truly an amazing novel to read, and this is one of my favourite novels up to date. It was breathtaking and gave me so much inspiration for a lot of my writing pieces in the past. To this day, I would still say that is a life-changing novel because it made me think for days because it is a book that I usually do not come across, with such a different plot from a lot of the books that I have read in the past. I found myself always flipping through the pages because it was such an interesting reading. Another reason why I found this novel to be ‘life changing’ is because of the new information that I have gained through the difficult lives of individuals in Afghanistan and the war that prevailed throughout the years.