Lost Horizon by James Hilton

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…