Book Report

Some things I've read lately:

Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts.  This is the craziest book I've read possibly ever. It's like Great Expectations only with eye-gouging, a prison break, opium, a cholera epidemic, guerrillas, torture and 900-some pages of other stuff I hope to never encounter in real life, all set in Bombay and Afghanistan. Apparently almost everything described in the book actually happened to the author. Really, really, oddly readable. Plus, now I know how to hold a knife if I'm ever in a prison laundry knife fight, and what to do in the event of a rat stampede or if set upon by a pack of feral dogs.

Ode to Kirihito by Osamu Tezuka. This is a very dark, very long thriller from the godfather of manga. Book design is beautiful -- I wanted to carry it with me just to show it off on the subway, but I also wanted to put it somewhere very safe. This is a good read, even if you're not a manga person. (I'm not.) There's almost none of the cutesy, infantilized stuff that tends to put me off the genre. The story -- about an array of characters investigating a disease that seems to transform humans into dog-like creatures -- is in turns engrossing, disturbing and sad. -- Peter