Shantaram | 
pickTOP. Veramente un libro che merita un film. Particolare come lettura e storia, sicuramente molto romanzata ma un gran libro appassionante. Hanno poi fatto il secondo ma non ha nulla a che vedere con questo
pickTOP. Veramente un libro che merita un film. Particolare come lettura e storia, sicuramente molto romanzata ma un gran libro appassionante. Hanno poi fatto il secondo ma non ha nulla a che vedere con questo
pickI‘m glad it‘s over! Which is sad to say of one I generally enjoyed. 933 pages was a bit much & would‘ve worked as two books. There is a lot in here. Adventure, danger, love, loss, laughs. Things I didn‘t like were the ego, much of the dialogue, philosophy without ever finding self, too many questionable decisions & unbelievably timed turns. First 2/3 enjoyable and I‘m glad I‘ve read it after occupying a thick chunk of shelf space for a few years.
pickAn incredibly large #chunkster at almost 1,000 pages, this novel is amazing! I was drawn in from the very beginning and loved learning about Bombay in the 80s. There were tons of characters and different story lines.
pickThis one is not for everyone. It is quite long and at times tends to wander off, but if you stick with it, the story it tells is quite intriguing and the author‘s leaning on his own experiences lends it a feeling of truth despite it being fiction.
@LitStephanie THANK YOU! I wanted Shantarum so bad….and here it is! The chocolates look perfect. Thank you so very much. Wishing you a very Merry Christmas 🎄🎅🏻
#jolabokaflodswap @MaleficentBookDragon
Bought myself a little prezzie ❤️💚🎄🎁
📺 This makes me want to sign up for Apple TV. I loved this book so I‘m intrigued … has anyone else read the book & loved it? The audiobook is FANTASTIC! Is anyone interested in the TV show?
so-soDefinitely worth the read. Some of the philosophical interjections didn‘t fit and were seemingly there just for the sake of being there. A sad tale of love and loss and betrayal. Can‘t help but loving and hating the main character. 933 pages tho? Settle in.
I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to 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 an universe of possibility. And the choice you make between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.
‘Her eyes were large and spectacularly green. It was the green that trees are, in vivid dreams. It was the green that the sea would be, if the sea were perfect.‘
Day 3 Over 500 pages
It's on my TBR. I get lots of recommendations but confess I am daunted by the size. 900 pages.
#FallTreasures
@Eggs @Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks
so-soVery wordy & long.... Not a style that I enjoy, very philosophical.
“I take everything personally — that‘s what being a person is all about.” ~~ Karla
pickGreat adventure set in India. So long and so great book. About living in India, their culture, black market, prison, living in poor street...and much more.
I listened it in November for #doublebookspin @TheAromaofBooks
#shantaram #gregorydavidroberts #adventure #fiction #audiobook
pickFinally finished this audiobook🤪 Fascinating story! The length (900+ pages) makes it uneven. I have to admit that I also struggled with the numbers of men characters; not always remembering right away who was who when reappearing in the story. Some of the prison and war violence, I skipped over. There were some great philosophical life moments to pounder. The Bombay criminal way of life was interesting.
#SummerBookSpinBingo August #BookSpin
🔻
“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 and being tortured.“
I‘m enjoying this audiobook so far 🎧
#FirstLineFridays
so-soI've heard multiple people rave about this being their favorite book, and that‘s really the only reason I didn‘t bail. The story is an impressive one (if actually true) and Roberts gives a compelling look into 1980‘s life in Bombay... but GEEZ does the man love a simile/metaphor 😒 He‘s trying so hard to be a novelist, or maybe a poet? that you can feel it...douche-chills, galore!
For this is what we do. Put one foot forward and then the other. Lift our eyes to the snarl and smile of the world once more. Think. Act. Feel. Add our little consequence to the tides of good and evil that flood and drain the world. Drag our shadowed crosses into the hope of another night. Push our brave hearts into the promise of a new day.
I‘d always thought that fate was something unchangeable: fixed for every one of us at birth, and as constant as the circuit of the stars. But I suddenly realised that life is stranger and more beautiful than that. The truth is that, no matter what kind of game you find yourself in, no matter how good or bad the luck, you can change your life completely with a single thought or a single act of love.
The only kingdom that makes any man a king is the kingdom of his own soul. The only power that has any real meaning is the power to better the world.
They couldn‘t understand that every time I entered the slum I felt the urge to let go and surrender to a simpler, poorer life that was yet richer in respect, and love, and a vicinal connectedness to the surrounding sea of human hearts.
Nothing in any life, no matter how well or poorly lived, is wiser than failure or clearer than sorrow. And in the tiny, precious wisdom that they give to us, even those dread and hated enemies, suffering and failure, have their reason and their right to be.
The cloak of the past is cut from patches of feeling, and sewn with rebus threads. Most of the time, the best we can do is wrap it around ourselves for comfort or drag it behind us as we struggle to go on. But everything has its cause and its meaning. Every life, every love, every action and feeling and thought has its reason and significance: its beginning, and the part it plays in the end. Sometimes, we do see.
My people, the people of my blood, we do not want to hate, because when we do hate, it is with the whole of the soul, and it can never forgive the hated one.
I knew him. I was his best friend—his only friend. If he lived, after he did this to me, there was no limit to his evil. That is how a man destroys his own soul—he loses the last limit to his evil. And I watched him, when he cut me with his knife, and when he walked away the last time, and I knew that he lost his soul. It cost him his soul, what he did … the things he did to me.‘
The sorrowing I‘d shunned had taken so long to find me because I couldn‘t let him go. In my heart, I still held him as tightly as I‘d hugged Abdullah only minutes before. In my heart, I was still there on the mountain, kneeling in the snow and cradling the handsome head in my arms. As the stars slowly reappeared in the silent endlessness of sky, I cut the last mooring rope of grief, and surrendered to the all-sustaining tide of destiny.
I let her cry for us. I let her live and die for us in the long, slow stories our bodies told. Then, when the tears stopped, she surrounded us with poised and fluent beauty—a beauty that was hers alone: born in her brave heart, and substantialised in the truth of her love and her flesh. And it almost worked.
I turned to look at her. The sky in her eyes held tiny storms. Her lips, embossed with secret thoughts, were swollen to the truth she was trying to tell me.
I know now what was happening to me, what was overwhelming me, what was about to consume and almost destroy me. Didier had even given me a name for it—assassin grief, he‘d once called it: the kind of grief that lies in wait and attacks from ambush, with no warning and no mercy. I know now that assassin grief can hide for years and then strike suddenly, on the happiest day, without discernible reason or exegesis.
'It was the kind of beauty that grows from the sum of its parts rather than from any one outstanding feature: a beauty that strikes the eye rather than the heart, and a beauty that sours if it isn‘t nourished by some goodness from within.'
'You can‘t reason with a man who has no sense of money and its … its value. It‘s the one thing all civilised men have in common, don‘t you agree? If money doesn‘t mean anything, there is no civilisation. There is nothing.‘
I didn‘t know then, as I do now, that love‘s a one-way street. Love, like respect, isn‘t something you get; it‘s something you give.
I‘d loved him too much, it seemed to me in that winter of war, for him to simply be gone, to be dead. If so much love could vanish into the earth and speak no more, smile no more, then love was nothing. And I wouldn‘t believe that.
Every act of love, every moment of the heart reaching out, is a part of the universal good: it‘s a part of God, or what we call God, and it can never die.
You can‘t kill love. You can‘t even kill it with hate. You can kill in-love, and loving, and even loveliness. You can kill them all, or numb them into dense, leaden regret, but you can‘t kill love itself. Love is the passionate search for a truth other than your own; and once you feel it, honestly and completely, love is forever.
It was just that all the hope had been so empty, so meaningless. And if you prove to a man how vain his hope is, how vain his hoping was, you kill the bright, believing part of him that wants to be loved.
I would never come to that Eden in the soul, where acceptance of punishment and acknowledgement of wrong and right roll away the troubles that lodge like stones in the barren field of an exiled heart.
One of the worst of my many failings, in those exile years, was my blindness to the good in people: I never knew how much goodness there was in a man or a woman until I owed them more than I could repay.
She laughed, and it was so rare to see and hear her laugh that I took those bright, round syllables of happiness into me like food, like drink, like the drug. Despite the stone and the sickness, I knew with perfect understanding that the greatest treasure and pleasure I would ever know was in that laugh; to make that woman laugh, and feel the laughter bubbling from her lips against my face, my skin.
Tears begin in the heart, but some of us deny the heart so often, and for so long, that when it speaks we hear not one but a hundred sorrows in the heartbreak. We know that crying is a good and natural thing. We know that crying isn‘t a weakness, but a kind of strength. Still, the weeping rips us root by tangled root from the earth, and we crash like fallen trees when we cry.
I could‘ve loved her. Maybe I already did love her a little. But sometimes the worst thing you can do to a woman is to love her. And I still loved Karla. I loved Karla.
At first, when we truly love someone, our greatest fear is that the loved one will stop loving us. What we should fear and dread, of course, is that we won‘t stop loving them, even after they‘re dead and gone.
‘Lin, a man has to find a good woman, and when he finds her he has to win her love. Then he has to earn her respect. Then he has to cherish her trust. And then he has to, like, go on doing that for as long as they live. Until they both die. That‘s what it‘s all about. That‘s the most important thing in the world. That‘s what a man is, yaar.'
When all the guilt and shame for the bad we‘ve done have run their course, it‘s the good we did that can save us. But then, when salvation speaks, the secrets we kept, and the motives we concealed, creep from their shadows. They cling to us, those dark motives for our good deeds. Redemption‘s climb is steepest if the good we did is soiled with secret shame.
pick936 pages of pure joy. An amazing journey through Bombay back in the days. I loved Prabaker, Didier, Karla character. Unforgettable book.. "Every human heartbeat is a universe of possibilities"
