The Kite Runner

That was one of the first books I read after the A-levels. Do go and read it if you haven't already, it was fascinatingly genuine, and realistic in it's portrayal of harsh Afghanistan, a country ripped apart by internal strife, set on the fringes of the 21st century. Made me grow up a little too. The end is far from a happy ending, but it's a hopeful ending. And that beats a bleak ending any day.

I borrowed the book from the National Library, and it was in quite a bad condition. What irritated me further was that one of the previous borrowers had left pencil marks all over the book. I was about to erase them, but I realised that most of the marks were indications of words that reader didn't understand. He or she had underlined and/or circled words unknown to him or her. I was curious to determine the age of the reader, but it was puzzling.

How old could the reader be, who borrowed a book meant for teenagers and adults, who didn't know the meanings of "retaliate", "blemished" and "hippie", but knew the meaning of a certain ugly little word which sounds like the first syllable of the word "country"? *

(That reader stopped reading the book after the first few chapters, or gave up marking words; the pencil marks disappear completely and I doubt it was because there was no other difficult word.)

Perhaps swear words are common even in primary schools. Or, perhaps the reader was familiar with swear words rather than other words (then why borrow such a book?).

I definitely wasn't the second person to read that copy of the book, judging by its condition, so I was surprised to find a spelling mistake no one else had noticed, even though the same word appears twice in that paragraph, once spelt correctly, once incorrectly. The word that was meant is "aisle", and it appears right the first time, but a few lines later, it's spelt "isle". I triple-checked, but "isle" made no sense in that sentence.** This surprised me, surely discerning readers would have read this copy before? I hate vandalising books, but this disturbed me.

I added in the "a".



* I didn't think of this myself, it's all thanks to a certain Literature teacher from England, who told us that in some contexts, a description of a girl as a "country girl" has sexual references.

** This really is true. I returned the book quite a while back so I am unfortunately unable to quote the page number and paragraph. The other single-word quotes are accurate, though. I remembered those.