thehappycynic wrote:Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts. Hands down. Those who love it fawn over it as some spiritual quest, thinking it gives them special insight into the slums of Bombay. The author was a convicted heroin dealer and bank robber. He escaped from prison in Australia and fled to India where he lived in Bombay's underworld for ten years.

"My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer," the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky.
"Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams."

sportourer1 wrote:50 Shades of Grey has to be well up there. Pure jealousy on my part to be fair

thehappycynic wrote:Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts. Hands down. Those who love it fawn over it as some spiritual quest, thinking it gives them special insight into the slums of Bombay. The author was a convicted heroin dealer and bank robber. He escaped from prison in Australia and fled to India where he lived in Bombay's underworld for ten years.

The book is presented in the first person like memoir and Roberts insists he's out to atone for his wrongs. But many of the events just reek of Hollywood pandering, as striving for a movie deal. Roberts seems to get into one life-threatening situation after another making sure to humbly kick-ass all the way through.

At one point he's getting beaten up by some thugs in a Bombay prison and he writes such cliches like "all through the beating, I never screamed, I never once gave them that satisfaction."

If you take it as a memoir, (which Roberts has apparently said that there is a liberal sprinkling of fiction in there), then he comes off as such a narcissist to the point where the book, for me anyway, has become unreadable.

Warner Bros. now own the rights to the book. So it looks like he's riding his checkered past all the way to the bank.