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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

not so fast

Not everyone thinks the Conservative government is a lock. Canada's opposition Conservative Party, which is set to bring down the minority Liberal government later this week, was hit by a new opinion poll on Monday that showed it was trailing in the country's most vote-rich region. The Leger Marketing poll for the Sun chain of newspapers put support for the Liberals in the powerful central province of Ontario at 43 percent compared with 31 percent for the Conservatives. Ontario, a Liberal stronghold at the federal level for the past 12 years, accounts for 106 of the 308 seats in House of Commons, and no party can hope to form a government without doing well there. . . . Prime Minister Paul Martin's Liberals have been badly hurt by a corruption scandal and Conservative leader Stephen Harper says the government must be defeated as soon as possible. The Leger figures, however, suggest there is no guarantee Harper can end 12 years of Liberal rule. Thanks, ALPF! I must say, I...
Read more

dipstick

So there won't be an election yet. Talk about a squeaker . Feel free to tell us how you feel about this, unless it's all been said already, then feel free not to. ALPF mustered his courage and sent more links, so I have some good commentary to post. I found this Macleans story on the Conservative party's reaction to Stronach's decision - and public reaction to that reaction - very interesting. Canadians seem almost universally turned off by the name-calling and sexist slurs. On the other hand, when a certain governor made his "girly men" pronouncement, his constituency howled with glee. (Which is not to say the rest of us weren't appalled.) The Macleans article also notes that not all the sexism came from politicians: Some of the most sexist characterizations of Stronach didn't come from her political adversaries, but from media. Montreal's La Presse newspaper ran a cartoon of Martin leaning out his car window to solicit a street-walking Stronach...
Read more