Hosseini, Khaled. The Kite Runner (Abridged). Audiobook: 200?

Really boring and sentimental, N and I thought, with dull language almost throughout. Sentimental and dull with such sentences as, "All my life, I'd been around men. That night, I discovered the tenderness of a woman." Ha! Boring because nothing bad really ever happens to Amir, the narrator. He likes to talk about the tragedy in his life, but whatever deaths happen around him (and I guess there are a bunch) don't create any real problems for Amir. They're just sad. He and his dad leave Afghanistan (pronounced by Mr. Hosseini as /ahf-HOHN-ee-STAHN/) without much trouble. Someone in their group is threatened to be raped, another shot, and some understanding higher-ranked military guy suddenly appears to save the day. Amir falls in love and marries the first Afghan woman he meets. She is beautiful and of a good family. He's told he has a gift for storytelling and decides to write a novel, which he does in the matter of a paragraph. After sending it out to agents he gets representation within months, and the book is taken by a New York house. So easy!

We announced our dislike of the novel at a gathering of friends yesterday, and such outrage! I think it was a factor of abridgement. I announced to N on the drive that if I was ever so lucky to have one of my books produced in audio format I would make a series of demands:

• I don't want to read it. This isn't just a factor of universal I Hate My Recorded Voice queasiness, but more a personal factor of my not liking acting or performance in general. To be forced in a studio to read, aloud, "'I said shut up!' he yelled"! No thank you. (Of course, another solution is just not to write shitty dialogue.)
• I get to choose who does read it. I mean, Ann Coulter or Carson Kressley reading something I wrote? No thank you.
• I don't want to edit the book for an abridgement. An abridged version is fine, I just don't want to have to be the one who decides what gets cut. I imagine this (and, well, all of these) is the job of an editor, and I probably wouldn't ever have to worry about it.
• No new sentences written by the editor. Like, say there's a paragraph that contains a necessary plot element but is long and maybe even overwritten (in my stuff? never!), words can be excised from said paragraph, but no new words can be inserted. No summary sentence can be composed to stand in its place. This is getting very nitpicky, but really, I don't want people reading a sentence I didn't write and attributing it to me.

I just wonder how much of this last one happened with TKR. Maybe abridging a book isn't at all difficult. Maybe all you have to do is remove all obstacles and hardship, and just usher protagonists toward the goals set for them in a matter of a paragraph or two.

All I know is, good timing, Khaled. Very good timing.