Book #47: The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad

Just after the Taliban fell in 2002, Norwegian journalist Asne Seierstad came to Afghanistan and while there, met a bookseller named Sultan Khan. She got to know him and his family, and she ended up moving in with them for three months to see what it was like being an Afghan woman and living in a (somewhat) typical Afghan family. She introduces all of the members of the family to the reader, and gives a good look into all aspects of their lives, as best she can, and particularly looks at the difficulty of being a woman in Afghanistan at that particular time. Over the course of her stay, she learns about when Sultan Khan took a second wife, about his sisters' yearnings to marry, about the squabblings between Khan's mother and wives and sisters (as they all live under the same roof).

Although I thought it was a very interesting look into the Afghan culture, an area which I am very unfamiliar with, I was annoyed with some aspects of Seierstad's writing. She comes across as very judgmental and biased against the men in the family, and really comes down hard on them again and again. I DEFINITELY agree with her and understand why she would find it hard to NOT do that, but it really makes the book feel more like her social experiment in trying to argue with these Afghan social and gender norms than investigative and unbiased journalism. In fact, her prejudice is so obvious, it makes me wonder if she was even trying to write journalism here (although I don't know what else it would be). It also made me wish that I had a more contemporary sequel, where we could find out if anything has changed or progressed for women in Afghanistan, since the Taliban's supposed fall, over the last decade, or if they've stayed the same or gotten worse.