Last week, my book club met to discuss Winter in Kandahar. I now fear this is the book club where we discuss why we didn't like the book - oh wait we all liked the Africa travel book. We didn't like the first book by Isabelle Allende and the group universally loathed Winter in Kandahar.
Each month the hostess (we are all women) selects three books and everyone votes on their favorite. Sometimes hostesses have read one or more of the books they offer and sometimes no. Our hostess had NOT read this book but chose it because it was about Afghanistan and it had GREAT reviews on Amazon. Clearly these reviews were written by friends of the author (I know this happens because a friend's mom writes terrific cookbooks but when the first books came out I personally knew several of the people who wrote the glowing praise. That said I highly recommend Fearless Baking - the recipes are all fabulous and all of them are easy enough that I (and hence you) can make them even after work. My favorite is the chocolate chip cake which Laura made me when I finished my dissertation and which I have since made a zillion times since. I especially love the cinnamon with the chocolate.
Any way Winter in Kandahar was awful. It read like a movie but not a good movie a bad movie. That said most of us finished the novel because it was a fast, summer read. The discussion at book group was about which inaccuracy did you find most galling - among them Afghanis speaking Arabic, a Pashtun woman who took a man she didn't know into a storeroom to kiss him, or mine the existance of unbelievably beautiful PhD students - I have never met one - the hours in the library or lab somehow does something to you skin. This is my pet peeve in movies too but I think Sharon Stone and Angelina Jolie have both played PhD scientists - truly people who are this pretty have other life options besides research.
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