One of the world's bestselling novels is also
one of the most banned books in America

Blazing Reader,

I'm reading The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini again. Actually, we're reading it twice more. I read a sentence in the original English, and then my wife, Ina, reads a line from the Dutch translation (De Vliegeraar). It's partly to help Jonah and me learn Dutch. We tried me reading the Dutch and Ina reading the English, but that made for an extra slow read.

According to Playbill, as of 2017 it had already sold over 31.5 million copies in 60 languages, making it one of the top one-hundred bestselling novels of all time.

By the 2020-2021 school year, however, it had also become one of the most banned books in North American libraries for its accounts of racism and sexual abuse (according to Pen.org).

In defence of his novel, Khaled Hosseini wrote a letter to a Florida school board, where he argued:

“I am a parent myself, I understand the parental impulse to safeguard our children from harm. But banning books like The Kite Runner doesn’t ‘protect’ students at all. It betrays them. It robs them of the chance that we as parents and instructors owe them, the chance to broaden their human community, to let them walk the world in another’s shoes for a while, to foster empathy for others, to be challenged by the experience and perhaps take a small step toward becoming fuller, richer versions of themselves."

You can purchase an (English) copy of this best-selling and highly censored book through my shop (or "winkel" as they say in the Netherlands)..

—John C.A. Manley

PS The Kite Runner is almost the Afghanistan counterpart of To Kill a Mockingbird — as both novels have seen their share of book bans for similar references to rape and racism. For example, check out my post from 2022, They're trying to kill To Kill a Mockingbird.

PPS Banning books sure seems to help their sales. I wish more libraries would ban my novel, Much Ado About Corona: A Dystopian Love Story.

John C. A. Manley is the author of Much Ado About Corona, All The Humans Are Sleeping and other works of philosophical fiction that are "so completely engaging that you find yourself alternately laughing, gasping, hanging on for dear life." Get free samples of his stories by becoming a Blazing Pine Cone email subscriber.