This thread used to be a cry for help seeking a copy of this book. Now that I have it, I decided the thread should be used to talk about the book itself and some observations I have after going through the first dozen lessons. I know that, for what few Georgian learners there are, there is a lot of buzz and curiosity about this book, especially because of its 250 verb conjugation tables. It's also more expensive and hard to find than most of the other Georgian instructional material out there.
Most learners have probably stumbled upon Aronson's book, which seems to be freely available now online, so that is the natural book to compare this too. They are each their own book and Aronson's book does not, I feel, purport to do the same exact thing as Kurtsikidze's book. His is, even in title, a reader's grammar. Kurtsikidze's seems to be geared more towards those looking for a more natural approach to actually learning to speak the language. But I will be comparing the two here simply because they are the ones I have experience with and seem to be the ones that are the most comprehensive according to reviews I have read.
So what is this book actually like? Well, it's a mixed bag, so far. On the positive side, the lessons are quite a bit more digestible than Aronson's. With his book, I found myself writing them out again myself in much more simplified manner, in list form, rather than paragraph form, summarizing the main points again for myself. With this book, that doesn't seem half as necessary. The main points are laid out somewhat more concisely.
The lessons are also shorter which makes them easier to work on one at a time and assimilate before moving onto the next. Aronson's lessons are very long and contain a lot of information which you have to absorb before proceeding onto the exercises which then encompass everything you've learned in that lesson. Here the lessons focus on smaller amounts of information at a time. I believe each lesson is meant to be studied over a week, meaning after a year you will presumably have gone through the book at a leisurely pace - a manageable goal, for sure.
The main drawback of this book is that there is no answer key. And a lot of the time you won't need one, but when you do, you will really wish it was there. Even in the first lesson, I encountered something which required me to ask a question on the forums here: დათვი ათია. The corresponding lesson simply lacks explanation that would make the exercise in question soluble. This presumably means "there are ten bears" but, according to all information given up to that point in the book, you would think it means "a/the bear is ten", as they have not explained how numbers work at all, never mind how they are used to count nouns.
Similarly, in one exercise, you are asked to translate the phrase " "ბუ ხის ტოტზეა" before any discussion has been made of the case system. The reader is here expected to be able to identify the genitive case of a word they have previously learned, "ხე", before the genitive case is even introduced.
Each lesson usually accompanies some new vocabulary in both books. Kurtsikidze's word choices often seem very strange. Granted, in the beginning, the word choices seem primarily geared towards exposing you to particular letters. However, given then one is asked specifically to memorize the words, it is a wonder that some more useful words weren't chosen. Does the reader really need to learn the word for "cheetah" in the first lesson? How many times do we talk about cheetahs, after all (are they even native to Georgia?)? Aronson's word choices seem actually seem more relevant to me, overall, especially considering the fact that his book doesn't take a conversational approach to the language. The advantage of Kurtsikidze's word vocabulary is that it starts becoming more thematic, i.e. there are lists for all body parts, etc, which is a good way to learn groups of new material.
There is also the odd sloppy editorial issue: "were is the boy going?" And some issues that are more subversive than that: In one lesson, she lists several verbs that have subjects in the dative case and objects in the nominative. Among these she lists two that she identifies as meaning "to take": "მიტანო" or "მიყვანო". Other verbs include those meaning "to have" (both animate and inanimate), "to love", etc. She then conjugates several of these verbs in a small table. One of them means "to take", which she conjugates "მიმაქვს", "მიგაქვს", "მიაქვს". The problem is that this is the conjugation for the verb "წაღება" which is not mentioned at all on this page, nor is the verb ever identified. To figure out that is the verb the conjugation belongs to at all, the reader would have to comb through the conjugation table and find the forms "მიმაქვს", "მიგაქვს", "მიაქვს" and realize they were in the chart for "წაღება". Otherwise, the reader will naturally assume (as I almost did before realizing what I read made no sense), that these are forms of the verb "მიყვანო", in the context of the lesson.
In closing, I have obviously not finished the book, but I feel I have read enough of it to get a general sense of its strengths and weaknesses. That is to say, it has some strengths, but the weaknesses to me make it hard to justify the price. The conjugation tables are useful, without a doubt, however one has to ask themselves personally whether they want to buy over $100 worth of conjugation tables. If the answer is "no", then one might consider continuing to use Aronson's book. After reading 100 pages of that, I don't think I encountered a single editorial issue or anything that didn't make more sense after reading the answer key. Overall, I do think the book is a great resource, but it is difficult to get so excited about it given the combination of obvious flaws and hefty price. I say this not out of spite (to be clear, I don't regret my purchase) but out of mild disappointment and caution to those thinking of making the investment.