The Second Read at a Different Age

I first read The Kite Runner at 22 and it moved me the way books move you when you are young: completely and without complication. I reread it at 37. The experience was different in almost every way. Not because the book had changed but because I had. The sections about fathers and sons, about guilt carried over decades, about what it costs to be a bystander rather than someone who acts, all of these landed in places the younger version of me did not yet have.