Alex,
I just finished "C# Primer, A Practical Approach" by Stanley B. Lippman, Addison-Wesley Publishing, ISBN 0-201-72955-5 and thought it was pretty good. There are a couple of chapters on things I really don't care about at the present time but I it answered a lot of other questions I had after going through the Microsoft tutorials and documentation.
The steep part of the learning curve, at least to me, is just figuring out when and where to use the 1000+ classes in the .NET framework.
Regards,
Bob Tracy
Never engage in a battle of wits if you're only half armed.