what i'm reading

I've been trying to read Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta. Has anyone here read this?

It's a book of nonfiction essays about the city now called Mumbai. I saw several excellent reviews of it; I was especially intrigued to read "what Dickens did for London, what Joseph Mitchell did for New York City, Suketu Mehta has done for Mumbai". That's a little odd, because Dickens and Mitchell did completely different things for their respective cities. But I love both those writers - Dickens being one of my all-time favourites, and Mitchell being perhaps the greatest chronicler of New York City - so Maximum City seemed like a natural for me.

So far, I can't get into it. I'm trying, but when I find myself going a week or more without picking up the book I'm supposedly reading, something is wrong. I'm going to put it aside and try again some other time.

There are also two other books, both important to me, that I left unfinished and am determined to get back to sometime this summer. Both are the final books in trilogies from which I read two and a half books: Sigfried Sassoon's trilogy, Sherston's Progress, and Taylor Branch's At Canaan's Edge. I've blogged about both extensively.

Meanwhile, I'm going to read Naomi Wolf's The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, so expect excerpts from that.