A really enlightening read

Hosseini is excellent at portraying the life of a foreign land, what it's like to live there, how things look, what people eat, what the customs are, but I think there are some built-in limits because it's fiction. He just can't satisy our every curiosity because he's too busy telling a story. I found "The Places in Between" to be a very enlightening nonfiction portrayal of Afghanistan, but there are almost no women in it. After reading the NPR story about the "controversy" over "The Bookseller of Kabul" by the female journalist Asne Seierstad, I ordered it and am almost finished. It's truly phenomenal. Seierstad lived with a family in Kabul and wrote an exceptionally detailed account of what their everyday life is like: what they eat, how they eat (with their right hands, segregated by sex), what people think about, what they wear, what it's like, layer by layer, to wear a burka, to walk in one, how burkas are hot and stinky and trap Kabul's famous dust, how you read body language in one, how men buy brides, how family hiearchies work, how they groom themselves, how sexual relations work in and outside of marriage, how they pray and travel, everything. It's just absolutely fascinating, in addition to being well written, and I found it addressed a lot of questions I had while reading Hosseini and Stewart.