Abandoned - for now anyways - at page 230 of 306. I had intended to finish it, and to an extent I am enjoying it. It is slow going though, and I have mostly absorbed the novel's charms by now. The last few chapters have just been completing that which was long ago set in motion. In any case, my reading and work schedules are already quite full, and a library copy of "Dune" has been sitting there taunting me for the last week. Time to move along.

As for Kim itself, I will say that its depiction of India is justly famous. Though it is viewed through an imperialist prism* (Kipling is the man who wrote "The White Man's Burden", after all), it is by and large an attempt to depict India on its own terms. I also enjoyed Kim's hijinks, for a time. But the reader is kept at too great a distance, some of the cultural terms are too foreign to me, and the value system is just a touch too antiquated for me to really grab on to it. Frankly, though "Kim" has traditionally been held up as a canonical text, I suspect its days in such company are numbered. We're rather past the time that an exploration of a non-white part of the world is, on its own, a source of wonderment.

Still, if I ever get around to reading "India After Gandhi" I may return to this as a gentle primer for immersion into that society.

2.5/5

*An aside: "lens" is of course the more precise word here, but it has been so overused by uninspired academics of the anointed class [heavy sarcasm here] - particularly within the field of of education - that I now refuse to use it on aesthetic grounds.