The President’s Choice by Anne Holt 2005

The President’s choice was written in 2005, by the well-known Norwegian author Anne Holt. Her book was translated to many languages, and among them, English.
The story takes place in Oslo, where the President of the United States is going to meet the King and Queen. Suddenly the president is kidnapped from her hotel room, and this is where it all starts. The Leader of the world is now gone, and the parade is going on with thousands of people on the spot. Nobody saw her disappear, nor what went down the minute she went missing. Days pass by, and no one seems to know anything .The Police, the FBI, the CIA are all over Oslo, without luck.
Anne Holt has so many details and plots going on at the same time. I really like the way she describes ways of breaking down an entire country without war. She mentions ways of doing it, like stopping the export of gasoline to the US, destroying their news channels, stop food supply from many angles of the world. She is more or less laying down her personal plan, where she crushes the perhaps most powerful country in the world. How will the United States look at Norway, when their leader is kidnapped in our country, on our National Day? What will the consequences be and will she ever be found?
The setting is what caught my attention, and makes the book one of my favorites. Holt makes the main plot so powerful when she connects it to the most patriotic setting of the year for hundreds and thousands of Norwegians. Personally, I like looking behind politics, the news and the propaganda to see what a country does not have. This is what she has done as well, by pointing out health and money as weaknesses, as well as the huge distances between the FBI, local police and the CIA. Everybody is doing something, but they are not properly connected. The author explains the simple facts of today’s bureaucracy.
The book itself is pretty realistic, as there is nothing that could not have happened in real life; although it would have been better if Hillary Clinton had won the election. In this novel, the president is a woman and not a man, which is revolutionary. After 43 male presidents, at the time the book was written, why did she pick the 44th to be a woman?
The genre of the book is thriller, as there is a nightmare going on in the Capitol City throughout the entire novel. This book was perfect to read right now around our National Day, but you could have read it any time of the year.
On a scale from 1 to 10, this one is a 9. It is a great book to read and it has got many different stories attached to it. The fate of a woman with world power is on the line. Will she ever appear on the tv-screens again, to greet her people? Will the bureaucracy ever gain its efficiency?

Ulrik Kruse

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hoseini

The title refers to two of the characters in the novel which are Hassan and Amir. Hassan is a very good friend of Amir and Amir is the narrator of the story. It is a novel about friendship. The story takes place most of the time in Afghanistan but also in the United States: in San Fransisco, California, and in Pakistan.

The book is about how people can be good or bad at different times. The protagonists are two children who grow up together and have a strong relationship (best friends), both of them are from Afghanistan but they have a different background and story. The society changes both of the boys, how they live, the conflicts they face and thus their friendship.
You get to read what it was like living in Afghanistan before the big conflicts approximately 30 years ago. It opens your view and shows you what it was like to be an afghan.

The character I liked most was Hassan because he was Amir’s gentleman (servant) and he took care of stuff - if something bad happened to Amir, Hassan backed him up. Amir could trust him 100 per cent. And during the kite running competitions, Hassan always knew where the kite would fall down. Kite running is where two persons have a kite and they try to cut the rope against each other. The one that falls down has lost and will loose his kite. Kite running was an important part of the boys’ childhood, and this is also reflected in the title of the book. The title also refers to the kite as symbol of freedom.

I really enjoyed reading the book, it had some sad parts and some happy parts. The happy parts are at the beginning of the book, when Amir and Hassan are spending time together during the kite running tournament and the sad part is when something seriously wrong happens to Hassan, further out in the book.

I would recommend this book to people that are on the age 14 and above, because there are some strong parts in the book that may affect you. As I mentioned earlier I enjoyed the book and found it really interesting. I’ve also seen the movie and also recommend you to see it. However I find the book better because it’s more detailed.

Aleksander W. Hansen