What I'm Reading Now

From the realm of "better late than never" comes this latelatelate second post. I have loads of excuses; please don't make me bore you by reciting them.

I'm about 450 pages through the 500ish page book Maximum City: Bombay, Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta. It's taken me through the worlds of real estate, organized crime, disorganized police, quasi-sex workers, Bollywood, and how they all intersect. It's all a bit crazy-making, but the man's writing is fantastic, except for a couple of brief stereotypical references to gay men and lesbians and good-sized people. The editor could have helped with avoiding a touch of the formulaic that entered into later chapters, but I am learning about Bombay, the writing is thought-provoking in most of the right places, and he has made me laugh aloud a few times. The library fines won't be much fun to pay, but better the library than the power company.

This book will work as great background for Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra, a mammoth book which I started and abandoned after running up colossal library fines. I have found out that Mehta and Chandra are friends, and were in Bombay/Mumbai at the same time, sometimes interviewing the same people at the same time. Little bitty island city.

Next up? Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, of which I've read about 130 pages and then stalled out on because I am not mentally prepared to say goodbye to these folks. I sometimes slow down at the end of a good book if I'm not willing to leave the alternate world I've lived in, and this is several hundred pages and years of alternate world to bid adieu.

And, of course, there's King of Bollywood: Shah Rukh Khan [sigh] and the Seductive World of Indian Cinema waiting to be read.

And friends to hang out with, and a kind, handsome man to ponder, and a dog who would like to go to the dog park rumored to be in Durham, and work to do, and movies to watch, and knitting to be done at places other than at boring meetings at work and at stoplights, and...