Reading for the Long Weekend

I usually don't post about a book until after I've read it, because it's a big risk that I'll never pick it up or finish it, and what if I tell you about a book that ends up being terrible?  I'm just going to tell you about this one anyway.

The other night I was strolling around Book People here in Austin, looking for a different kind of book, something I hadn't heard about before.  I read through probably 25 different staff recommendations before I settled on this book:

Shantaram: A Novel

Gregory David Roberts

Synopsis from the back of the book:  "Gregory David Roberts was born in Melbourne, Australia. Sentenced to nineteen years in prison for a series of armed robberies, he escaped and spent ten of his fugitive years in Bombay -- where he 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.  Recaptured, he served out his sentence, and established a successful multimedia company upon his release."

Anyone who knows me will recognize that this isn't my typical reading fodder.  No matter what type of book I'm looking to read, I subject them all to the first-page test.  If it doesn't grab me on the first page, I move on. 

This book had one of the best first pages I've read in a long while.  In fact, I was sold on the first paragraph:

"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 realised, somehow, through the screaming in my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, 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 a universe of possibility.  And the choice you make, between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life."