[pysqlite] select during a commit

The flash on my system is slow, so commits are taking about a second or 
longer.  If another thread does a select while this occurs I'm seeing a 
huge delay.  In the following, my 1 second commit ended up taking about 
35s.  The first select timed out.  The second select which should have 
taken 50ms ends up taking 3s.

    32:44 aaaa   DEBUG    before BEGIN EXCLUSIVE
    32:44 aaaa   DEBUG    after  BEGIN EXCLUSIVE
    32:44 aaaa   DEBUG    before COMMIT
    32:45 b      INFO       before SELECT
    33:18 b      INFO       before SELECT
    33:18 aaaa   DEBUG    after  COMMIT. Ran in 34.537153
    33:21 b      INFO     after  SELECT. Ran in 3.036871
    33:21 b      INFO     before SELECT
    33:21 b      INFO     after  SELECT. Ran in 0.146346
    33:21 b      INFO     before SELECT
    33:21 b      INFO     after  SELECT. Ran in 0.035919

Since the writer has an exclusive lock, shouldn't the reader threads 
stall until the commit is finished?  From the documentation of sqlite, 
I'm not clear how this could be happening.