Shantaram
Haven't updated in awhile, but I don't have much time. I will in about a month. In the meantime...
My friend Collin is reading this book and says it's amazing. I hate recommending books that I haven't read, but I read the first two paragraphs and I'm sucked in, I just don't have time. It's called Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts. Tristan talked about bad books and bad beginnings, but this has to quite possibily be the best introduction to a fictional novel I've ever read. Here's the first two paragraphs, you can see if you like it or not:
It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall being tortured. I realised, somehow, through the screaming in my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helpessness, I was still free; free to hate the men who were torturing me, or forgive them. It doesn't sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when it's all you've got, that freedom is a universe of possibility. And the choices you make, between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.
In my case, it's a long story, and a crowded one. I was a revolutionary who lost his ideals in heroin, a philosopher who lost his integrity in crime, and a poet who lost his soul in a maximum-security prison. When I escaped from that prison, over the front wall, between two gun-towers, I became my country's most wanted man. Luck ran with me and flew with me across the world to India, where I joined the Bombay mafia. I worked as a gunrunner, a smuggler, and a counterfeiter. I was chained on three continents, beaten, stabbed, and starved. I went to war. I ran into the enemy guns. And I survived, while other men around me died. They were better men than I am, most of them: better men whose lives were crunched up in mistakes, and thrown away by the wrong second of someone else's hate, or love, or indifference. And I buried them, too many of those men, and grieved their stories and their lives into my own.
I want to read it!!!
My friend Collin is reading this book and says it's amazing. I hate recommending books that I haven't read, but I read the first two paragraphs and I'm sucked in, I just don't have time. It's called Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts. Tristan talked about bad books and bad beginnings, but this has to quite possibily be the best introduction to a fictional novel I've ever read. Here's the first two paragraphs, you can see if you like it or not:
It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall being tortured. I realised, somehow, through the screaming in my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helpessness, I was still free; free to hate the men who were torturing me, or forgive them. It doesn't sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when it's all you've got, that freedom is a universe of possibility. And the choices you make, between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.
In my case, it's a long story, and a crowded one. I was a revolutionary who lost his ideals in heroin, a philosopher who lost his integrity in crime, and a poet who lost his soul in a maximum-security prison. When I escaped from that prison, over the front wall, between two gun-towers, I became my country's most wanted man. Luck ran with me and flew with me across the world to India, where I joined the Bombay mafia. I worked as a gunrunner, a smuggler, and a counterfeiter. I was chained on three continents, beaten, stabbed, and starved. I went to war. I ran into the enemy guns. And I survived, while other men around me died. They were better men than I am, most of them: better men whose lives were crunched up in mistakes, and thrown away by the wrong second of someone else's hate, or love, or indifference. And I buried them, too many of those men, and grieved their stories and their lives into my own.
I want to read it!!!