Salman Rushdie isn’t high up on my list of favorite novelists. I tried to read The Satanic Verses out of curiosity once but gave up after a couple of inscrutable chapters. I made it deeper into Midnight’s Children, but I didn’t connect with that book either and never finished it. What interests me more than Rushdie’s tales of magical realism are the stranger-than-fiction plot points of his life. I still remember reading a riveting excerpt in The New Yorker from his 2012 memoi