Books I'm reading

I'm creating a new post to log about the books I'm reading or have read earlier.
Thanks to the iBooks application on my iPhone, and to hundreds of free books available to download, my reading habit has received a shot in the arm. (I still read very slow though.. ;)

I'm currently reading 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' by Mark Twain.
I had enjoyed reading 'Adventures of Tom Sawyer' (by the same author) earlier. And it compelled me to download AOHF as well.
Though these books were written about 130 years ago, the sense of humour is still fresh.
People who love RK Narayanan's 'Swami and Friends' will love 'AOTS'. Both the authors' styles are somewhat similar.

Earlier I read 2 other books. Both are old and forgotten books. I attempted to read (in vain) just because they were freely available on iBooks.
First one is 'India: What it can teach us?' by Friedrich Max Muller. Published in 1900-1910 probably.
Its a collection of his lectures to the Indian Civil Service students in UK, who are about to embark on their job posting to India.
In several places he quotes and praises Indian scripture so much that the reader gets saturated. Its an ideal book for a fanatic to pick one statement here and one statement there and showcase Hindu greatness to the world.
But I didn't like it much. The tone in many places is like this - 'Ancient Indian scriptures are very valuable. People who created these must somehow be related to our (european) ancestors.'

Anyway the Europeans were very dominant at that time and went on claiming the whole world as their own. They looted countries and siphoned off riches to Europe, plundered new lands and wiped out natives, and even sold humans as slaves.
So, it shouldn't come as a surprise, if they claimed the valuable scriptures of another civilization as their own, especially when the people of that civilization themselves didn't know who created them.

Second book is 'A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar' by Robert Swell
This one is for the history buffs. The author reads historical accounts by travelers of those times like Ibn Batuta, Nuniz, etc, and portrays Vijayanagar. He shows some further analysis to determine which traveler's account is more accurate.
It begins with describing the conditions under which Vijayanagar kingdom arose.
Soon after Mohamed bin Tuglaq invaded south and went back, a hindu kingdom emerged to secure the South. Many hindu kingdoms united and made it stronger. A few years later the Hyderabad portion of Tuglaq's empire broke off and formed the Bahmani kingdom. They both remained rivals until about 2 centuries later the Bahmanis completely decimated the Vijayanagar empire.
The historical accounts are in great detail and describe the atrocities committed against the people. One can't simply read it and not get disturbed. This one is for people researching history.