Arcadia

by Tom Stoppard

Arcadia is actually a play rather than a book, but I read it rather than saw it performed. I actually had never heard of the play before a friend proposed it for a book club. I was much more familiar with Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which we also considered reading. The two plays have a lot in common, but I vastly preferred Arcadia, and couldn't believe that I had never heard of it before.

It's hard to state concisely what Arcadia is about. The whole play takes place in the room of an English country house, but the scenes alternate between the early 17th Century and the present day. The period scenes revolve around the family's tutor and his student, the brilliant young daughter of the family. The modern scenes involve researchers and professors trying to determine the identity of the hermit that lived on the residence and the events surrounding a visit to the house by Lord Byron. The dialogue is very clever and often very amusing, but it's also awash in philosophical and scientific concepts. Newtonian physics, chaos theory, determinism, entropy, classicism, romanticism, and scholarship all become topics of conversation at one point or another. But despite the  heavy topics, the dialogue is quick and light. As the play draws to a close, the two time periods begin to blend together, with props and sounds from one era appearing the other. By the final scene, characters from both periods appear on stage together, and their dialogue spliced together is both hilarious and poignant. 

I absolutely loved Arcadia, and wish I could see it performed. It just finished up a Broadway run in June, but it is often called Stoppard's finest play, so hopefully there will be more productions in the future.

The Kite Runner

by Khaled Hosseini

The Kite Runner is a rarity on my reading list in that it is a popular best-seller. I read a lot of genres, but NY Times best-selling fiction isn't my usual fare. But I got this book for Christmas a few years back, and I've been meaning to read it for a long time. The narrator had a privileged childhood in Kabul, Afghanistan, but fled the country during the Soviet invasion. Twenty years later he receives a call from an old friend that summons up memories of his childhood and calls him back to an Afghanistan he no longer recognizes. This is a harsh book of betrayal, guilt, transition, and redemption.

One of The Kite Runner's strongest points is its vivid description of pre-Soviet Kabul. The book is a window in to Afghan society and culture, including the the kite flying that gives the book its title. That rich heritage is juxtaposed with the brutal regime of the Taliban that the narrator witnesses upon his return. The Kite Runner is mostly very depressing, but I still enjoyed it because it gave character and flavor to a place that I normally only hear about in headlines.