What are you currently reading?

Bizet said:
Confessions of an Economic Hitman

This book exposes how the U.S. has historically exploited developing nations through strategic loans.

It's a interesting and easy read, just watch out for the 2023 revised edition of this book - it’s got an anti-Russia/Putin bias that sours the taste a bit.
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Seven months later...have you read Perkins' sequel The Secret History of the American Empire?
 
El Dorado said:
Nice! That's something I've always wanted to research: Portugal's overseas empire...particularly the East Indies and Africa.

I'd also like to find any good English-language history books on the Russian Far East...especially the Cossack exploration and conquest of Siberia and the Russian fur trade. Anybody have any recommendations?
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Yuri Slezkine's Arctic Mirrors. It's less a general narrative history and more a study on how the people of the region were perceived by Russians over the centuries.
 
I tried to see if I could get into The Wheel of Time series because the general culture seems to hold it in high regard. I honestly have no idea why people like it. I read the first two books and knew something was wrong from the very beginning with Jordan's quality of writing. Even taking direction from Tolkien (who is so much more superior as a writer and worldbuilder you'd think the two were different species) the books began and ended as a complete yawn for me. Jordan is about as interesting to me as your typical boomer who spent their life working one job and watching TV in their free time. I cannot, for the life of me, begin to describe how painfully boring the first two books were, and I tried to read them slowly to absorb this so-called excellent series, to buy into the whole world he was crafting. My primary curiosity was to see how a fantasy series could be 14 books long, and now I know, it's because nothing happens and everything is over described.

Last night I was wrestling with the decision to not finish WoT. I have a tendency to get stubborn about things I've started or invested time into. This time I'm putting my foot down. I will not waste another minute on this series, even if Brandon Sanderson's entries are apparently good (I might read the wikipedia plotlines of the next 10 books and then pick up where Sanderson is).
 
I decided to read Brandon Sanderson's entries to see if the WoT got better. Now I have finished it. I don't think it was particularly good, even with Brandon's work he put into it. I found his own writing to be poor much of the time. I think the series suffered far too much from too many characters and factions. Too many people talking, not a lot happening, even when things did happen, it was described in a sentence or short paragraph, hardly absorbing material, so the next thing you know, you're like, 'wait, did so-and-so die? when did that happen?' I did not have the patience for this series. I read the wikipedia stuff on it, asked the AI to explain the ending (which I understood, but I thought I had missed something). I suspect the series is considered great by people who read it as teenagers and young adults who weren't familiar with a lot of concepts educated adults tend to understand much better. Things like God and anti-God (Satan), the parallels and blatant thefts from LotR and Dune, as well as stealing the ending and final solution from the bible itself (sealing Satan away for all time). None of it struck me as profound, and not a single character in the series meant a thing to me. Overall, I'm glad to be done with it. I do not recommend, the payoff of 14 books was not at all worth it.
 
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