jonathan strange & mr norrell (susanna clarke)

this book is just over a thousand pages long, and the first hundred are, frankly, a bit of a struggle. a paucity of other literary options meant i was forced to stick with it, and actually got quite hooked. clarke's style has a hint of the magical realist about it, in that she claims an authoritative, historical, narrative voice to recant a tale of fiction. although the book is about magic however, it does not quite have the flights of fancy so symptomatic of someone like marques: or rather, when they appear as a result of various spells, they're described in such a clipped manner of reportage the effect is of reading a textbook rather than a novel. as such, what you have is not so much a political statement reclaiming the concept of truth itself, but rather a mere, but neat, authorial trick to make the book more captivating, by virtue of the constant play between fiction and reality. her insistence on long, pedantic, footnotes, though intensely annoying at first, actually serves to further this effect of reading a compelling slice of actual history. good stuff, but you really have to stick with it through the opening... once you get used to the style, and the charismatic strange appears in the text to overcome the dull norrell, it's a very good read.

among the believers: an islamic journey (vs naipaul)

naipaul critiques the rise of islam as a panacea for all the wrongs of a country, studying its failure to bring salvation to post revolutionary iran, pakistan, and indonesia. it is an academic study of the misguided, yet incredibly prevalent, belief that one religious text can provide the answers for every problem, social, political and economical, a society might face. what's more distressing is how evident it is to the individuals he meets that their reliance on the koran to solve everything is flawed, and yet how unable, or unwilling, to accept this fact they remain. naipaul won the nobel for literature, so it's brilliantly written... the incisive content is an added bonus.

maximum city (suketu mehta)

i wasn't as impressed by this as everyone said i would be. it's a relatively interesting account of the fractious state of mumbai, and the author met some undeniably shady characters (gangsters, hookers, and, craziest of all, jains), but his style left me a little cold. the revelations, such as they are, are partially supppressed by the relative banality of his descriptive ability. still, probably essential if you're on the way to mumbai i suppose (though i'd rather go to delhi and read city of djinns by william dalrymple: better book, better city).