Rudyard Kipling's 'Kim'

This classic was the book for this week... I read it on my Amazon Kindle while on planes.

One of the particular pleasures of reading 'Kim' is the full range of emotion, knowledge, and experience Kipling gives his complex hero, Kimball O'Hara, the orphaned son of an Irish soldier stationed in India. Raised by an opium-addicted half-caste woman since his equally useless father's death, the boy has grown up on the streets of Lahore India.

"Though he was burned black as any native, Kim was white--a poor white of the very poorest." His peculiar heritage as a white child gone native, combined with his "love of the game for its own sake", makes him uniquely qualified for the 'big game'.

So when the long-awaited colonel comes along, Kim is recruited as a spy in Britain's struggle to maintain its colonial grip on India.

Kim also has relationships with a Tibetan Lama, a Afghani horse trader, a white school for boys, and other 'spy trainer' folks.

This portrait of the Indian and sub-continent peoples takes this from just a gripping yarn, to a timeless classic. Highly recommended!!