Lost in Shangri-La

I have been putting Lost in Shangri-La aside for years as it felt like it would take too much effort to read.  I should have known that a book given away for free with iBooks would be an entertaining and require very little effort. This book was a fun read with very little in the way of resistance or challenge. It wasn't anything particularly profound or paradigm shifting, but it was an engaging way to spend a few hours.

Those few pleasant hours allowed me to get my to be read number down to 155. Unfortunately it popped right back to 156 when my plan to delay the arrival of my latest purchase, The Destructive War, was thwarted by Amazon's efficient supply chain. I skipped two day delivery in favor or a later delivery date (and the $1 discount on a digital item that was offered with the slower delivery), but my book was shipped with a phone case that I ordered for my son. Oh well, I had good intentions. I guess I'm just left to be stuck at 156 for months and months.

I could get off of 156 if I could just finish A House for Mr Biswas. I started this book in early February. It's the middle of March and I'm still a touch over 100 pages from being finished. It's not that this is a bad book or a real drag to read, it's neither of those things. I've just been reading other books instead (like the aforementioned Lost in Shangri-La). As the end of Mr. Biswas gets closer I'm more inclined to read it. It helps that I haven't been immediately drawn into a different book on my phone. I started Dragonflight (yet another ebook I've borrowed from the library), but getting through the indirect description of what's happening and some less than easy to keep track of names has made the early going on this one a bit slow. The basketball tournament has also been distracting me from reading. 

It's fitting that I'm spending weeks and weeks on Mr. Biswas as I've had it for years and years. I bought it soon after V.S. Naipaul won the Nobel Prize back in 2001. I read another of his books, The Enigma of Arrival (it was called his masterpiece in the Nobel citation so I'm not surprised I started with that one), and was engaged enough to try another. I was thrown off by the Indian characters in Trinidad and wasn't able to find a drive to read that book amid my flurry of book buying activity. (I bought loads of books when I had no money.) I bought it at Border's to give a sense of how long I've had it. I've said it before and I'll keep saying it, books like this is what Book Shelf Zero is all about. It's hard to overcome the inertia of a book sitting on my shelf for years.

A House for Mr. Biswas has had a long residence on my shelf, but there are others that have been waiting longer. As best I can determine from my memory of when I bought my books, a memory that is strangely vivid, For Whom the Bell Tolls is my longest held book. I think I bought it while I was still in high school. I've tried reading it a couple of times but I quickly lose interest and move onto something else. Hemingway has never really made the earth move for me, I've only read The Sun Also Rises and I almost gave up on that a couple of times, but I will eventually make it through this piece of propaganda. Now that I've recognized it as my longest held book, maybe I will have to get to it sooner than I had planned (or maybe I should save it for the book that brings me to Book Shelf Zero?).