Okay, I said I “finished consuming this”, and I did. I just didn’t finish it. I abandoned it at around page 100. I just wasn’t getting anything out of it. The subject matter is interesting, but the presentation quashed any interest I might’ve had – flipping quickly between briefly-identified subjects, big walls of text with seemingly little organization, and a too-strong academic tone for a book aimed at the general reader. I found Venkatesh’s sentence structures to be byzantine, requiring a number of re-reads. Add to that the repeated rehashing of material covered earlier, and I just couldn’t do it.