Dripping Dry: Literature, Politics and Water in the Desert Southwest Book

I'm pulling the plug: this book has been on my "currently reading" shelf for almost 3 years, and I've decided I'm never going to finish it. Nevertheless, I can honestly select "I liked it" as a rating. This collection of Hecht's newspaper sketches of everyday life in interwar Chicago is highly readable and amusing in exactly the sardonic way one would expect from the (co-) author of The Front Page or Hecht's many, many Hollywood screenplays; that's why I picked it up. The problem is that in this form it's too much of a muchness; I can imagine a Chicago newspaper reader looking forward to the next Hecht piece, but read all at once like this they become monotonous. Of course, it's hard to fault Hecht for that; this was never the way he meant them to be read. I can imagine it's an invaluable resource for Hecht scholars, if there are such folks, but for everyone else a couple of selections will go a long way.