(late) January monthly blog

The more I read and the more we have socratic seminars the more I notice the issue of compassion that humanity feels to other human beings.
If I remember correctly, back in January we were in the process of reading A Thousand Splendid Suns. I thoroughly enjoyed this book but made the poor decision of not doing the monthly blog when I should have, so my memory of it is a bit foggy. I do recall, however, that the author of the novel accomplished the very impressive feat of having absolutely terrible things happen to nearly every character in the novel without it becoming tedious, and included a few notable pleasantries that would have been nothing short of cliche and dry in any other novel.
Thinking back, it is interesting to think that that is an issue at all. Having so many horrible things happen that one grows bored and uncaring of the unreal human lives portrayed before them, and to feel something akin to guilt when admitting extreme happiness for Tariq not being dead at all or the reveal that Jahlil is not the massive total tool he was described as being in the first half of the novel. To elaborate, genuinely sit back and consider how terrible it is that human beings, when observing the happenings of characters on a movie screen of behind the pages of a book, can grow bored and indifferent to the characters' misfortunes because too many bad things have happened to them. It's tricky to think of a specific example, but I find that a good generalized cliche of this would be something like the damsel in distress trope. Oh wow...beautiful character with zero redeeming qualities is in danger, and just so happens go be the love interest of the protagonist...I guess they're going to go and save them or something and oh no whoops someone died along the way or something, wow what a surprise. Such sacrifice, such bravery and terrible happenings.
Even though one would probably feel sympathy and sadness and despair over such an event...as a probably innocent character is placed in danger which is obviously very bad...the reader or observer is left in tears not from sadness, but sheer boredom. While I agree with this specific scenario in most cases...it is interesting to think about how weird it is that people can become so easily uninterested when horrible things happen without actual significance/consequence, or when they happen too often.
So by that reasoning, a book like A Thousand Splendid Suns should be a real snooze-fest as it's riddled with every terrible act or event imaginable. War, violence, verbal/physical/sexual abuse, miscarriage(s), terrorism, murder, poverty, the loss of nearly every loved one the protagonists hold dear...any horrible thing imaginable can probably be found in those pages. Yet very few, if any, people in our class found this novel boring or awful or unbearable or anything of the sort. We still hesitate to admit admiration for certain cliche happy events, as said, but in such a sad novel any shred of hope is cherished.
So saying, it's interesting and almost unexplainable as to why this one novel breaks the mold and the human nature of lacking compassion for characters when too many bad things happen to them. I wouldn't call it a major flaw in human design, of course, but what I mean by all of this is it's sad that people lose compassion when they grow tolerant and over exposed to cruelty and terribleness...but it is interesting to notice the exceptions to that phenomenon, as in A Thousand Splendid Suns.