For instance, the beginning of this paragraph: “Incensed, I shoved the men out of the way, grabbing them by shirt collars, and hurling them aside with the strength that swarms into the arms of righteous anger.” That rhyme “swarms into the arms” is vaguely annoying.

I found most of the prose either too reliant on comparison and analogy, or just absurd. I made it about 300 pages in on this 900+ tome, or about as far as “free medical clinic for slum-dwellers.” Here’s why: (We know Bombay today as Mumbai, but for consistency’s sake and because at the time Lin/Roberts was in India Mumbai was still known as Bombay, we’ll keep with Bombay.) According to the back of the book, while hiding as a fugitive in a foreign country, Lin/Roberts “established a free medical clinic for slum-dwellers, and worked as a counterfeiter, smuggler, gunrunner, and street soldier for a branch of the Bombay mafia.” He escapes from the prison – of the most maximum security kind, he tells us – and finds his way to Bombay, India. Lin the narrator, like Roberts, was convicted to nineteen years in an Australian prison after being involved in a series of bank robberies. So, for this year’s reading I chose Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts. Last year, I read the Jeff and Ann Vandermeer-edited anthology The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (the Corvus UK edition) it may be one of the best, if not the best anthology I’ve ever read and has completely influenced my writing and the way I think about writing (in particular, the selections from Eric Basso, Michel Bernanos, Alfred Kubin, Joanna Russ, Bruno Schulz, Shirley Jackson, Kelly Link, Michael Cisco, and Angela Carter remain fresh in my mind). Norrel by Susanna Clarke, which is easily one of my favorite books. The first year I read Jonathan Strange and Mr. For the past three years I’ve chosen a book to be my “holiday reading.” I choose them mostly based on their behemoth size and because they look like fun reading for cold days, and begin reading them in late November or early December and through the beginning of January.

The narrator by michael cisco