Shantaram

While on our honeymoon, I had to bring a good read for the 12 flights we would be taking, and for all the time we'd spend sitting and relaxing on the beach. I had found lying on the coffee table at my parents home the book Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts. This 937 pages book pulled me in like no other book I've read recently has, and it has given me a new appreciation for and interest in India. 

Although Shantaram is a novel, it's largely factual and based on the life of the author. 

"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 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."

Even though the length of the book may appear daunting, it's totally worth the time. So go out and get this pick and enjoy the read!