Bookish.

Prague, by Arthur Philips. American ex-pats in Budapest, c. 1990-91. Good collections of scenes from a special time and place, even if the characters could be a little disjointed sometimes (no doubt resulting from the semi-autobiographical nature). Anyway, there was some really good writing and good insights here.

Designs on the Land: Exploring America from the Air, by Alex S. MacLean. Pictures from above. The essays are forgettable. I declare a war on sprawl snobs.

Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire, by Alex von Tunzelmann. The end of the raj, and partition of India and Pakistan, as told via the experiences of the Mountbattens, Nehru, Jinnah, and Ghandi. I'm pretty ignorant about this history, and I had no idea about the relationship between Edwina Mountbatten and Nehru. Highly readable and recommended.

Lush Life, by Richard Price. Slick, gritty police procedural in today's Lower East Side. Basically a tale of a random shooting as a result of a mugging, but solving the crime is not the point - you pretty much already know who did it. I was a skeptic initially, but it's true - the dialogue is amazing. Price has written for The Wire, and this book is also a glimpse into a world of slang that is largely foreign, to me anyway. Reminded me of Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest in that respect, though Matty Clark is no Continental Op. One error I noticed - the book was set in October 2002, but at one point a character makes a reference to Baghdad as an exemplar of urban violence. I think that's probably unintentionally anachronistic. Kakutani rave, and Price profile.