In the past few years I have read a lot of adventure and lost-world novels. I find most of them to be great fun, and it is a bonus that you can read them for free since most of them are old enough to be in the public domain now. My latest venture into this genre was James Hilton's 1933 novel Lost Horizon.

This is the novel that introduced the world to the famous Shangri-La. Of course I had heard of Shangri-La, and knew that it was a mystical utopia in the mountains of Asia, but didn't know much more than that. I certainly didn't know the plot of the novel and so I went into it with mostly no expectations or ideas of what might happen.

I'm sure many of you know the main plot: four people are kidnapped in a plane which is flown into a remote part of Tibet. There they are led to a magical valley in the Kunlun mountains which contains a monastery called Shangri-La and a fertile, temperate valley. They are unable to leave until the next group of porters arrive - hopefully within a few months. In the meantime they are given lodging, food, access to a remarkable library, and plenty of social interaction with the villagers of the valley. Everything is nearly perfect, and while some of them decide they want to remain in Shangri-La, others are determined to leave by any available means.

I was somewhat surprised to find myself truly enchanted with the idea of Shangri-La! I have literally dreamed of living in a peaceful, enlightened society with enough time and resources to do whatever I wanted. Oh I wanted to go there so badly... but I live in the real world and so am required to stay here where I spend most of my life working to support myself and my family. Sigh. Anyway, all this is to say that I thought the story was great! The author also is an excellent writer and I found it easy to read this short novel. However, not all is rosy! It was written in 1933, and so comes with some outdated racial ideas and a few ethnic slurs. Overall, though, I very much enjoyed reading it.

You can find it online for free in many places, but I got my EPUB version at Canada's Project Gutenberg web page. (scroll down to Hilton, James for the HTML, Text or EPUB versions.)

* Bonus: After reading the novel, I decided I wanted to watch one of the movies based on it. I went with the 1937 black-and-white version, which was free to watch on The Internet Archive. Be aware, however, that it changes a few aspects from the novel (I know, big surprise right?!) It basically white-washes most of the characters, adds some love interests, and throws in two completely new characters. However, it does capture the feel of the novel nicely, and the rest of it was pretty close to the book.