{"id":918,"date":"2011-01-08T22:14:00","date_gmt":"2011-01-09T03:14:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wilsonld.com\/weblog\/?p=918"},"modified":"2015-05-31T20:21:25","modified_gmt":"2015-06-01T02:21:25","slug":"shantaram","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/?p=918","title":{"rendered":"Shantaram"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Gregory David Roberts, 2003, St. Martin’s Press, New York<\/p>\n

I honestly don’t know what to think about this book.\u00c2\u00a0 There were times when I thought I was reading the best work of literature ever created.\u00c2\u00a0 At other times, I felt that the author was blathering platitudes.\u00c2\u00a0 One thing I will say is that I thought it was authentic; if what the author says is true, he lived a lot of this novel himself.<\/p>\n

The highlights of the book, I think, are the vivid portrayal of life in India, espcially in the slums, and the emotions of\u00c2\u00a0a\u00c2\u00a0fugitive from justice, living on the run.\u00c2\u00a0 Also, the prose was pretty well constructed.\u00c2\u00a0 The sheer length of the book, however, seemed to\u00c2\u00a0detract from the entire work.\u00c2\u00a0 Every character in the book, no matter how minor, was described in detail.\u00c2\u00a0 Also, rather than building toward\u00c2\u00a0some kind of\u00c2\u00a0grand finale, the book seemed to stumble from one situation to another.\u00c2\u00a0 For example, in the last forty pages the\u00c2\u00a0story got sidetracked by a dancing bear that had to be\u00c2\u00a0smuggled out of Bombay in a\u00c2\u00a0disguise.\u00c2\u00a0 While this side story may have held my interest earlier in the book, by the time I got to this point (about 890 pages)\u00c2\u00a0I was really looking at getting toward some kind of conclusion.<\/p>\n

Did I mention the book was long?\u00c2\u00a0 Anyway, it was a pretty good read but could have been much better with a bit more disciplined story line and editing.\u00c2\u00a0\"3<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Gregory David Roberts, 2003, St. Martin’s Press, New York I honestly don’t know what to think about this book.\u00c2\u00a0 There were times when I thought I was reading the best work of literature ever created.\u00c2\u00a0 At other times, I …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[15],"class_list":["post-918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=918"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/918\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1806,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/918\/revisions\/1806"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}