"Democracies have a weakness: if a bad law has enough money or people behind it, it stays on the books. This allows the perpetual continuationn of the most absurd, unreasonable practices.

In America, I can walk in to a gun show and buy a handgun for less than the price of a good dinner for two, even if I am insane or a convicted criminal. In Bombay I can walk into a flat I've rented for a year and stay there for the rest of my life, pass it on to my sons after me, and dey the lawful proprietor's efforts to get my ass off his property.

In both instances, I have the law behind me." (Suketu Mehta, Maximum City, p.130)

Like many book lovers, I stop reading many half-way (or even less than halfway). Also like many book-worms, I stop and restart many books, too. And more than a few times, I've found myself asking, "Why did I ever put this down?!"

The latest stop-then-resume yarn is Suketu Mehta's Maximum City, exposing that great human spectacle that is Bombay. A slightly more sophisticated version of what Dominique Lapierre's City of Joy did with Calcutta, MC is filled with stories of tragedy, violence, filth, urban decay, ruined-ness and yet, I suppose, a glimmer of hope that at least some individuals are fighting against and redeeming all that's going wrong in that place.

I'm still halfway, but I can see why it won the Kiriyama Pacific Rim award for non-fictionn and made it to finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

So I'm wondering again, why did I ever put this down at all?