The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

Khaled Hosseini was born in Kabul, Afghanistan in 1965. He is the oldest of five children. His father worked for the Afghan foreign ministry and his mother was a teacher of Farsi and History at a large girls high school in Kabul. In 1976, Khaled’s family was relocated to Paris, France, where his father was assigned a diplomatic post in the Afghan embassy. The assignment would return the Hosseini family in 1980, but by then Afghanistan had already witnessed a bloody communist coup and the Soviet invasion. Khaled’s family, instead, asked for and was granted political asylum in the U.S. He has been in practice as an internist since 1996. He is married, has two children (a boy and a girl, Haris and Farah). The Kite Runner is his first novel. ~authors website

About Afghanistan 

Afghanistan is a mountainous landlocked country, about the size of Texas, located in Central Asia. Wedged between the former Soviet Union, Iran, Pakistan and China, it has been an area of tension for hundreds of years.  Afghanistan achieved a measure of national unity in 1747 and became a constitutional monarchy in 1931. In 1973 the monarchy was overthrown in a bloodless coup, and a republic was established. The republic failed to survive and in late December of 1979 thousands of Soviet troops air lifted into the country. The war against the Soviets lasted many years, before the cease-fire just a few years ago.

Interview with the Author

The Number 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith

This first novel in Alexander McCall Smith's widely acclaimed The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series tells the story of the delightfully cunning and enormously engaging Precious Ramotswe, who is drawn to her profession to "help people with problems in their lives.” 

A Look Inside Gaborone

The Republic of Botswana is situated in Southern Africa, nestled between South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe and Zambia.  Botswana is the largest exporter of gemstone diamonds in the world.

Gaborone, the capital, is by far the most important city in Botswana. 

Gaborone is a young city with nearly a quarter of a million inhabitants. It scarcely existed in the 19th century before Chief Gaborone moved his Batlokwa tribe into the area from the Magaliesburg Mountains in the early 1880s. He settled in the Tlokweng area on the Notwane river. 

In 1966 Gaborone became the capital of newly independent Botswana. Two decades later, in 1986, it was declared a city. Today, stimulated by the discovery of diamonds and the rising wealth of the nation, Gaborone has become one of the fastest growing cities in the world, while still preserving its offbeat rural charm. ~website

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall the work of Charles Dickens, this magnificent novel captures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India. The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers--a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the caste violence of their native village--will be thrust together, forced to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain future. ~review

About the Author

Born in Bombay in 1952, Rohinton Mistry immigrated to Canada in 1975.  He began writing stories in 1983 while attending the University of Toronto.   Rohinton Mistry's first novel, Such a Long Journey, creates a vivid picture of Indian family life and culture as well as tells a story rich in subject matter, characterization and symbolism. It is set in 1971 Bombay, when India went to war over what was later to become Bangladesh.  Such a Long Journey was made into a movie in 2000, starring Om Puri and Roshan Seth. 

A Fine Balance won the L.A. Times Book Award for Fiction, the Commonwealth Writer's Prize, Canada's prestigious Giller Prize and was a 1996 Booker Prize Finalist.

A Look Inside Bombay

India is known as the home of the vasectomy, with the Indian government claiming to have performed the most amount of vasectomies, than any other nation. In 1973 over 7 million vasectomies were performed in India due to cash initiative schemes. In the Gorakhpur vasectomy camp in India in 1972 there were at least fourteen cases of tetanus infection. This led to the first reported deaths due to vasectomy - eight of them were described in the Times of India. ~website

The train stations in Bombay are crowded…One needs to be physically fit to do the daily commute by train. People travel hanging out of trains, sitting on top of trains, and there are casualties every day." 

The problem of homelessness is worse now than in 1975, because the population has almost doubled. There must be twice as many people living on pavements, in slums and in rudimentary dwellings.

The Little Children by Tom Perotta

Tom Perrotta's thirty-ish parents of young children are a varied and surprising bunch. There's Todd, the handsome stay-at-home dad dubbed "The Prom King" by the moms of the playground; Sarah, a lapsed feminist with a bisexual past, who seems to have stumbled into a traditional marriage; Richard, Sarah's husband, who has found himself more and more involved with a fantasy life on the internet than with the flesh and blood in his own house; and Mary Ann, who thinks she has it all figured out, down to scheduling a weekly roll in the hay with her husband, every Tuesday at 9pm. They all raise their kids in the kind of sleepy American suburb where nothing ever seems to happen-at least until one eventful summer, when a convicted child molester moves back to town, and two restless parents begin an affair that goes further than either of them could have imagined. Unexpectedly suspenseful, but written with all the fluency and dark humor of Perrotta's previous novels, Little Children exposes the adult dramas unfolding amidst the swingsets and slides of an ordinary American playground.  ~review

About the Author

Tom Perrotta is a novelist and short story writer whose work explores the adolescent experience.  Perrotta grew up in New Jersey and currently lives outside Boston. He received his B.A. in English from Yale University and his M.A. in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. He has taught writing at Yale University and Harvard University.  He is also the author of Joe College and Election: A Novel, a satirical, funny story about a suburban New Jersey high school election gone haywire that became an acclaimed Paramount movie starring Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon.  

-A remarkably astute observer of youth culture, Perrotta has been called "a writer to watch" by The Washington Times.

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

To call Middlesex a coming-of-age novel about a hermaphrodite would be like calling The Odyssey a story about some guy on a boat. Middlesex is nothing short of epic; one family's survival on a twisted path through Greece to 20th Century America; battles ranging from the fires of the Turkish wars, the igniting of Michigan race riots, and the burning desires hidden within a girl named Callie and the man named Cal who she is to become.  ~review

Interview with Author

I've known Jeffrey Eugenides for several years and in several contexts — first as one of his readers, then as a student of his at Princeton, and now as a friend. From the beginning of his novel The Virgin Suicides to the end of his most recent email, I've always been enamored of how vivid Jeff's mind is and how clearly he seems to know what it is he wants to say. All of which made me excited not only to have an early look at his forthcoming novel Middlesex but to hear some of his ideas in this more formal context about writing and life. 

In The Virgin Suicides, the narrative voice was a first-person-plural "we." Middlesex is told by a hermaphrodite who was raised as a girl and later started living as a male. Obviously you like to complicate the narrative voices in your fiction. Voices you don't hear every day. The "we" voice in The Virgin Suicides came easily, however. It was the first thing I had, really. The first paragraph was told by this collective narrator and the book grew from that. With Middlesex, it was different. I had a story in mind but I didn't have the right voice to tell it with. The voice had to be elastic enough to narrate the epic stuff, the third-person material, and it had to be a highly individualized first-person voice, too.

For a long time I didn't believe what I was writing, but then I gave Cal permission to zigzag between first and third person, and then I did believe it. A lot of time passed while I was screwing around with all this, but then I finally had my starting point. All I had to do was write another 530 pages. ~by Jonathan Safran Foer

Hermaphroditus

In The Greek Myths by Robert Graves, the god Hermaphroditus is "a double-sexed being ... with womanish breasts and long hair." Classicists gush that he/she was as handsome as his father (Hermes) and as beautiful as his mother (Aphrodite). One assumes that this mythic model would render the Greeks benevolent to their double-gendered offspring, but no... They invariably destroyed them at birth, as the Romans later did. Two-to-three people out of every one thousand are born hermaphroditic (claims Robert Edgerton's 1964 study published in American Anthropologist), and almost every culture tries to "fix" this minority. 

Madame Secretary by Madeleine Albright

In winding up her far-ranging autobiography, Madeleine Albright tells us with amusement that once, after leaving office as U.S. Secretary of State, she was mistaken in public for Margaret Thatcher. They both reached the highest rank ever attained by a woman in their respective democratic governments. Were fiercely partisan political figures, and held very strong opinions and were never afraid to battle for them.

Albright is best known for serving as U.S. ambassador to the UN in the first Clinton term, and as Secretary of State in the second. The other thing about Albright that most people will recall is that only after she became Secretary of State did she learn that her family ancestry was Jewish --- that three of her grandparents had died in Nazi concentration camps. 

Her life, though unsettled due to wartime exigencies, was not a rags-to-riches tale. She was born Marie Jana Korbel in Prague into a comfortably situated family. Her father was a respected Czech diplomat and college professor. Fleeing the Nazis, the family spent time in England during World War II. They arrived in the United States when she was 11, and her father took a teaching job in Denver. She entered Wellesley College in 1955 and became an American citizen two years later. She married into a wealthy and well-connected American family in 1959. Her first political idol and mentor was Edmund Muskie, in whose doomed presidential campaign she took part. After the breakup of her marriage, her career in government and politics took off during the Carter presidency, her only personal setback being a painful divorce in 1983. ~reviewed by Robert Finn 

Madame Albright Quotes 

"All women kind of feel that every day they have to do a superior job." 

"Because in some way or another, by somebody, I am reminded of the fact that I'm a woman in a man's world.” 

"I like being a woman and I figure I use everything I have.”

"I'm pretty spontaneous. And I think it's taken me 63 years, but I know who I am." 

"I literally have, sometimes, this out of body experience, just thinking, well Madeleine Albright is a person," Albright says, "who is secretary of state." 

"And then there is the person who comes home from work, ...and nobody would believe this but I go and I put on my flannel nightgown, have cottage cheese, and go and watch television. And that's Madeleine." 

"I love makeup and I need it tonight...because I just got off the plane.” 

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

A murder mystery set against a religious conspiracy theory involving Leonardo Da Vinci's paintings, Jesus, Mary Magdalene, their child and the Holy Grail, The Da Vinci Code mixes page-turning suspense with art history, architecture and religious history. — Ayesha Court

The Secret Life of Leonardo da Vinci 

A prankster and genius, Leonardo da Vinci is widely believed to have hidden secret messages within much of his artwork. Most scholars agree that even Da Vinci's most famous pieces—works like The Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, and Madonna of the Rocks—contain startling anomalies that all seem to be whispering the same cryptic message…a message that hints at a shocking historical secret which allegedly has been guarded since 1099 by a European secret society known as the Priory of Sion. In 1975, Paris's Bibliothèque Nationale discovered parchments known as Les Dossiers Secrets, identifying numerous members of the Priory of Sion, including Sir Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, Botticelli, and Leonardo da Vinci. French President, Francois Mitterrand, is rumored to have been a member, although there exists no proof of this.

~authors website

Here is what we can say about Jesus’ sex life: 

Most mainstream biblical scholars do not believe Jesus was married to anyone, because the Gospels don’t mention it.  A few biblical scholars argue it’s likely Jesus was married--even though the Bible doesn’t mention it—because Jewish men at that time nearly always married. These scholars tend not to care one way or another whether his wife was Mary Magdalene. According to the New Testament: The Gospels say Mary Magdalene was a follower of Jesus and that, according to Luke 8, she supported him out of her own means, meaning that she was probably wealthy. She was the first, or among the first, to discover the empty tomb.

Mona Lisa

Never in the history of Art has one painting been so admired. This is due largely to the enigmatic smile, which has caused much speculation. Nowhere can be found any records of the Mona Lisa model sitting.  Dr. Lillian Schwartz of Bell Labs suggests that Leonardo painted himself, She digitized both the self-portrait of the artist and the Mona Lisa. She flipped the self portrait and merged the two images together using a computer. She noticed the features of the face aligned perfectly! 

Distant Land of My Father by Bo Caldwell

The distant land referenced in the title is Shanghai, told through the eyes of Anna Schoene, the only child of an American businessman who makes his millions in this bustling Chinese city in the 1930s. The city is coloured by Joseph Schoene's love for it, and the childhood adoration of young Anna.  The Distant Land of My Father begins like a fairy tale: "My father was a millionaire in Shanghai in the 1930s.... 

Interview with Author

Have you ever visited Shanghai? 

No, I haven't visited Shanghai or any of China.

Has the book been published in China, if so, was it well received?

It hasn't been published in China, and I doubt it will be because of the negative treatment of communism.

Do you have any plans for a second novel, if so where will it be set? 

Yes, I'm working on a sort of prequel to Distant Land, a novel based on the lives of my missionary grandparents. It begins in 1906, and takes place in the interior of northern China, in the North China Plain. I'm very much enjoying the research, and being back in China.

What gave you the inspiration to write this dramatic tale? 

The book is based on the life of my uncle. My mother was from a family of five, and this uncle was the oldest, she the youngest, with thirteen years between them. My grandparents were Nazarene missionaries in China, so my mother and her siblings grew up there. When he graduated from Vanderbilt in 1931, he decided to return to China, figuring that with the Depression, his chances for a job and a salary were better there than in the U.S. Once in China, he began working in Shanghai and quickly made money. The Shanghai and quickly made money. The Novel follows the surface details of his life: he was imprisoned by the Japanese, released, went back to Shanghai after the war, was imprisoned by the Communists, released,

 returned to California with next to nothing, all of that by the time he was forty-five years old. When he returned to the U.S., he remarried (his first wife divorced him), and eventually settled in San Francisco. Chinese food has always been part of family dinners. My uncle and an aunt had a chiaotzû cook-off once, and I used to help my mom make them when I was little.)  ~randomhouse review

Chinese dumplings are one of the most important foods in the Chinese New Year.

Traditionally, members of a family get together to make dumplings during New Year’s Eve. 

January 22, 2004 will mark the beginning of the Year of the Monkey and Year 4701 of the Chinese Calendar. 

Shanghai is a mix of Asian and European styles. If you walk along the harbour you get a feeling that you are in a British port city, Shanghai means “by the sea”. The English obtain by force a concession in Shanghai. This meant that they didn't have to follow Chinese laws. At this time there were more cars in shanghai than in the rest of China together.  Even after the Japanese occupation of Shanghai the western powers continued to live like before in Shanghai. It all took an end when the Japanese attacked pearl harbour.