They do say "Never meet your heroes". And Salman Rushdie is certainly a hero of mine. Ever since reading Midnight's Children as an undergrad, I have been hooked. He's one of very few authors whose books I actually own and have kept through several international moves. Back in the day, Imaginary Homelands was even my answer to a security question.

With all that said, this is not so much a book by Salman Rushdie as a book by AND about Salman Rushdie. Once you get past the lurid details of the attack and the painstaking recovery, you are left with the title's eponymous "Meditations", which cast an oddly mundane light on fame, healthcare, family, and friends. It's not that I don't care when a lifelong friend who happens to be Martin Amis dies, it's just that I don't know, in sharing your final exchanges with him, where the memoir ends and where the name-dropping begins.

Of course, I can't begin to comprehend what it must mean to have lived so much of his life under this sword of Damokles, only to be attacked thirty years later. And I certainly can't begrudge a person, especially a writer, the need to gather some closure into words. I think, though, that I would rather have read this as a shorter think-piece in a magazine than as a standalone book.