Papillon

I really enjoy reading fiction, i had assumed that non fiction was too close too reality and therefore boring, not able to hold my interest for long, focussing too much on inter-human relationships and menial day to day things...if i was going to invest time from my day to put into reading a book, i had always wanted it to exciting and daring; the opposite of how i see my own life, that way i could use it as a welcome escape to long boring weekends, between tedious chores.
Then some guy came along and requested that i read this specific book, an autobiography...damn i wasnt welcoming the task, and put it off for a few days before deciding to give it a chance...now im on page 45 out of 560, so thats almost 1/11 th...and so far im hooked, and i was impressed with the Translator's Introduction, a piece of which i will quote here;

"The new world in question is of course the underworld, seen from within and described with extraordinary natural talent by one who knows it through and through and who accepts it's values, which include among others courage, loyalty and fortitude. But this is the real underworld, as different from the underworld of fiction as the act of love is different from adolescent imaginings, a world the french have scarcely seen except here and there in the works of Jean Genet and Albertine Sarrazin, or the English before Defoe; and it's startling fierce uncompromising reality, savagely contemptuous of the Establishment, has shocked and distressed many a worthy bourgeois. Indeed we have a minister's word for it (a minister, no less) that the present hopeless moral decline of france is due to the wearing of miniskirts and to the reading of Papillon.

Nevertheless all properly equipped young women are still wearing miniskirts, in spite of the cold, and even greater numbers of Frenchmen with properly equipped minds are still reading Papillon, in spite of the uncomfortable feelings it must arouse form time to time. And this is one of the most striking things about the phenomenone Papillon: the book makes an immense appeal to the whole range of men of good will, from the Academie francaise to the cheerful young mason who is working on my house. "

Page 11, Translator's Introduction
Papillon by Henri Charriere
translated from French by Patrick O'Brian