Rate the Last Book You Read

what's everybody been reading?

@billmcneal: I'm finishing up the first volume of Lovecrafts short stories.

I guess I'm too late to the party and the hype has ruined some of the effect because I am not particularly wowed by any of them. I can appreciate what Lovecraft was going for especially back in those days. That said a lot of it reads like Goosebumps for adults.

I'm getting three magazine subscriptions from Coke Rewards points: Wired magazine, a magazine in spanish to practice my spanish, and Money magazine

@john1912: is that the Dune that they turned into a movie?

Half a King - Joe Abercrombie. I'm 3/4 of the way through. It's my second attempt at reading it, not sure if I will finish it. IMHO no where near as interesting or exciting as all his previous work. The characters don't stand out like they usually do, it's all a little bit more reined in.

Haven't noticed this thread before so heres a list of stuff I've read in the last year or two:

Hugh Howey's Silo series: Liked it mostly, the history of how and why people ended up living in a silo and the inner workings of the silo and the culture of the people living there was fascinating. Some twists in the story seemed unplausible, but I guess they were necessary to get the story moving. 4/5 for the whole series.

Howey's Sand was also pretty good. Again, fascinating world, interesting writing, but some predictable and unplausible events to make the story flow. 3,5/5

Imperial Radch trilogy by Ann Leckie was also an interesting read. The protagonist was the strong point of those books. Namely the AI of a sentient space ship that was destroyed, forcing it to exist within one of its former controllable human bodies. I really enjoyed the world of these books. After the last one I was left wanting to read more stories in that world. 4/5.

The Kingkiller Chronicles by Patrick Rothfuss: I agree with Vinny: Pat needs to get the third book done already. The best writing I can remember ever having the pleasure of reading. The flow of Pat's writing is just a pleasure to read and really sparks up the imagination. 5/5

The Movement Trilogy by Jason Gurley: A space opera about humanity moving into space after earth becomes unlivable that spans over several centuries. Liked it, but didn't love it. I'm still waiting for the third part of this with some excitement. 3,5/5

Welcome to Night Vale was a nice read. I never had the time to listen to the podcasts, so I picked up the book for late night reading sessions. It almost reaches Douglas Adams levels of absurdity and that might be the biggest reason I liked it so much. 4,5/5.

Lately I've been going through the Dresden Files series by Jim Butcher. I'm currently about halfway through book 9: White Night and I really like these books. The detective noir-fantasy mix is fun, and the main character Harry Dresden is relatable. Twists and turns in the plot are sometimes really predictable but most of the time take me by surprise. 4,5/5 so far.

Between everything else I've read all of David Wong's books and Yahtzee Corshaw's books. I'm a sucker for dumb fun with absurd humor.

Sorry for the wall of text. I'll return with shorter posts now that I'm up to speed.

Ian Fleming's Live and Let Die, which is rather dated in a variety of ways but I found it interesting for how many different Bond films pieces of this book ended up in. Dr. No, For Your Eyes Only and Licence to Kill all have chunks of this book in them which I did not know prior to reading it. Gave me some sense as to how liberally those movies pulled from the books. Very loose adaptations.

Nothing right now, because I have been busy with my studies.

The last books I read were Nation (pretty decent, although inconsistent at times) 4/5, and The Ocean at the End of the Lane (very good, perhaps one of the best of the author, and that is saying a lot) 5/5

The Hepatitis Bathtub and Other Stories by NOFX

It's incredible. Everyone should read it, even if you don't like the band or punk music.

Mass Effect: Revelation.

It seemed competently written as game tie-ins go, but the constant damselling annoyed the shit out of me.

I just read The Last Wish (the first Witcher short story collection) and enjoyed it way more than I was expecting to. I'm already halfway through the second collection. They're well-written, pleasantly chronologically jumbled, thought provoking pieces of world-building. I haven't played any of the games, but if the story telling there is half as competent, they're some of the best-written games ever. 4.5 (translation's not always the best) terrifically terrifying monsters out of 5.

Just before that, I finished up Richard K. Morgan's "A Land Fit for Heroes" trilogy. I really liked the story and the nods to his Takeshi Kovacs trilogy. The way they tie together is really cool. It's never explicitly stated that the two trilogies are part of the same universe, but the connections are many and vast. However, I wasn't a fan of the protagonist. And it's not because he's gay - which Morgan goes out of his way to point out to us as often as possible. It's because he's despicable. He's a self-loathing, cynical murderer. I get that Morgan wants him to be an anti-hero, but where he succeeded with Takeshi Kovacs due to the character's charm, he fails here in that he never seems to be able to decide if Ringil is moral or not. One minute, he's saving orphans, the next he's ruthlessly killing people for no particularly good reason. Kovacs was a dapper asshole. Ringil's just an asshole. Whose best friend constantly calls him "faggot". I'm not mister-politically correct or anything, but it really is jarring after a while. Still, mostly well-written, great story, good side characters who are largely more interesting than the lead. 3 steamy hot gay sex scenes out of 5.

I just finished up Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon, after about 3 months of reading it on and off. Just like every other Pynchon I've read, it was really great. It had its ups and downs, but for a nearly 1,100 page book I think that's to be expected, and more often than not I was more than impressed by it. I particularly enjoyed the discourse between groups of Vectorists and Quaternionists arguing over which is a better way of modeling the world. Overall I loved the mishmash of popular early 20th century fiction genres (western, boy's adventure stories, spy fiction) and, for the most part, it was a very fun read. That said it's kind of hard to recommend to anyone but the most hardcore of Pynchon fans; people looking for a place to start with him, I think, should look towards Inherent Vice or Gravity's Rainbow if your feeling adventurous.

A Brief History of Western Man by Thomas Greer, written in the 1960s and winds up being an interesting and insightful history despite being a general one.

The Well of Ascension (Mistborn book 2) by Brandon Sanderson, 5/5

These are the first Sanderson I've read - really enjoying them - well written, easy to read, and a great story - might have to read some more Sanderson at some point.

Now, if you'll excuse me I'm off to start the book 3 :-)

I played Uncharted 4 last month. A couple weeks before I started playing it I finished a book called Pirate Hunters, which was about a couple real life modern day treasure hunters looking for a sunken pirate ship, and it was pretty damn good. They don't seem to kill quite as many mercs or whatever as Nathan Drake, nor do they spend much time climbing rock walls, swinging from ropes, or hanging from a ledge with just their finger tips but they're still pretty bad ass. They also delve into the pirate whose ship they were looking for, and he did some pretty cool stuff too. All in all it was a fun book.

After beating Uncharted 4 I finished another book, Republic of Pirates, which was about the exploits of a few of the famous historical pirates and the guy who took over the pirate port city of Nassau in the Bahamas and shut the pirate operation down. It was a bit dry at times, but still mostly interesting. After finishing that I started watching Black Sails and now I have the urge to hunt down a copy of Assassin's Creed Black Flag and play that so I've been on a weird pirate kick that spans across all media forms lately.

But it hasn't been all pirates for me, as last month I also finished Bully Pulpit by Doris Kearns Goodwin, about presidents Teddy Roosevelt and Taft, and the muckraker journalists of the day. I borrowed it from the library in May thinking it was so long I probably would only get through maybe a third of it and then have to return it and finish it some time later, but instead I flew through it surprisingly fast. I liked it quite a bit. Today I'll be starting another Teddy Roosevelt book, River of Doubt.

Also right now I'm in the middle of Einstein's Prophecy, a fiction story that I thought would be a globe trotting treasure hunt style thing involving Albert Einstein but thus far seems to be heading more in the direction of a demon is on the loose chasing after Albert Einstein type story, but I'm enjoying it.

And continuing my recent kick of doubling up on books featuring somewhat similar subject matter I'm also in the middle of The Hunt for Vulcan, which is about the theoretical planet Vulcan which was invented as part of a theory to explain Mercury's strange orbital behavior and eventually was dismissed after Einstein's gravitational theory rendered it unnecessary.

I've been juggling a lot of books recently because I listen to them as audiobooks while I watch Red Sox games. That's 3 hours a day (at least) to fill, so plenty of time for book listening.

The Day of the Triffids (1951)

28 Days Later was clearly based on it, but instead of zombies, you have blind people, and slow-moving, carniverous plants that make eerie clicking sounds.

It's fucking deadly. I wish someone would make a game based on the world. It's seriously fucking deadly.

Julian, a novel by Gore Vidal The book covers the life of Julian the apostate, last Pagan emperor of Rome. Being a history buff and no fan of organized religion I'm predisposed to liking this book based on the subject matter alone. Unfortunately the characters thin and undeveloped, and the relationships unbelievable and inorganic. Julian, a guy who never misses a chance to point out the inherent absurdity of Christianity, is frustratingly unaware of the absurdity his own superstitions.

"A Jewish rebel is my personal savior? Yeah right that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to slice another bulls throat open in front of this old temple, the last throat slicing produced ill omens".

The book is very big on telling, not showing. "These characters are best friends now because.....", "This bookish philosophy student is now an elite general and leader of men because....".

2/5

Zoo. Awful 1 star out of 5

The Very Hungry Caterpillar, 10/10

Just wrapped up House of Chains, which is book 4 of the Malazan Book of the Fallen. It was the first book in the series to really click for me and I really enjoyed it.

What I love about Steven Erikson's writing is how completely different it is from most other fantasy. Everything in this world has been created from scratch (no elves, dwarves, etc, the races have names like Tiste Andii or T'lan Imass and are nothing like traditional fantasy races). However, a side effect of this is that I found the first couple of books really hard to get into.

I've found Erikson to be sort of the anti-Sanderson. He's not at all interested in taking time to explain to you how the various magic systems work, or who these various races are. You're just going to get dragged along for the ride and have to figure it out as you go along. This made books 1 and 2 very difficult to follow, but now that I'm over that initial hump, I'm really loving the unique world and some really great characters.

@nophilip: The Malazan series is my favorite piece of fantasy. It's not for everyone though. The complete lack of exposition makes it really hard to read sometimes. House of Chains is probably one of the easier reads since the first half of the book at least sticks with one character (Karsa, who is possibly the most well-developed fantasy character ever written. Seriously, he fucking goes places.) I've read the whole decalogy a number of times now and pick up new things very single time. The depth of Erikson's work is mindblowing!

So you know, it really only gets more confusing the further you get in the series. Events in House of Chains take place partly before and partly alongside the events in the first three books. The next book (Midnight Tides) takes place before the events of the first four books and features a whole new cast of characters (some of whom are my favorites. Tehol Beddict is fucking great! His brother too.) you've never seen before many of whom will become very important later on. On an entirely different continent. Also, it never explicitly tells you that it's happening before all that other stuff. You have to figure that out another couple of books later. It really does all come together in the end though. Well worth getting through all ten books. More than once. It's impossible to catch everything your first, second or even third time around.

Remember Beak!

It was the Martian. I liked it enough, I liked seeing Watney's thought processes and figuring out survival problems 1 step at a time. Not the best prose, but a nicely optimistic piece of hard sci-fi. 4/5.

Stanislaw Lem, Fiasco — ★★★★☆

Another one of Stanislaw Lem's novel's about first contact with an alien species. In this one, the spaceship Hermes travels many light-years from Earth to the planet Quinta, which shows faint signs of intelligent life. When they arrive, they find a civilization that is technologically more primitive, but seems to have resulted from an arms race that went bezerk. The Hermes is repeatedly attacked, and every attempt to try to communicate provokes further hostility.

This is the fourth novel of his that I've read that tries to imagine what first contact would be like. Other are

• Eden, (1959) — This is the most conventional. The crew of a human ship crash on the planet Eden, which is inhabited by an intelligent bipedal life form. Their culture and technology is incomprehensible, however, and attempts to communicate result in confusion.
• Solaris, (1961) — This is his most famous novel. Astronomers find what is believed to be a sentient ocean on planet Solaris. If the ocean is actually sentient, its mind is completely unlike that of human beings. Bizarre phenomena occur on and above the planet, and the crew of a space station struggles to determine if the phenomena are truly intelligent or merely extremely complex.
• His Master's Voice, (1968) — (I mentioned this one earlier in the thread.) Instead of the far future, this one takes place in the near present. A transmission from an advanced alien intelligence is observed, and scientists try to decode it. The alien beings appear to be far more advanced than human beings, and all attempts to understand fail. (This isn't a spoiler. The narrator says so in the prologue.)
• Fiasco, (1986) — As above.

The one theme that seems to run through it all is pessimism.

Armada ( the 2nd book from Ready Player One writer)

That's quite the review...

I bought Ready Player One years ago now and still haven't read it. How's his new one hold up?

@sinusoidal: Honestly, I liked Ready Player One a little more, but Armada felt 'tighter'

Its a good book, but its very similar to RPO and I think that if I hadn't read RPO so recently, I probably would've like Armada more. Does that make sense? All in all, I like them both and if you like 80's nostalgia and video games, you'll like both.

@atastyslurpee: Ehh, I'm not so big on nostalgia driven story-lines. Despite having grown up - or maybe because I grew up - in the eighties. I fucking love video games though. I'm not sure what's keeping me from reading Ready Player One. I've read a couple dozen longer, harder reads since I bought it. I just keep putting it off.

I don't have much to say on the last book I read (did a re-reading marathon of the Harry Potter series), but I've started in on American Psycho, being a fan of the movie that was always curious about the wildly infamous source material.

Too early into it to pass any sort of judgment, but the writing style takes serious getting used to. The present-tense writing really bugs me, even though I get why Ellis used it. However, I've already hit upon one of my new all-time favorite passages, where Bateman obsessively lists, explains, and namedrops every little product he uses and wears, as his morning routine becomes increasingly vain and absurd (yet entirely within the realm of what people like him actually do).

Just a fantastic, funny character moment that really sticks with me.

I'll definitely update after I've finished (seems to be a pretty quick read). (why do I rely so heavily on parentheticals)

League of Dragons by Naomi Novik. The last book in the Temeraire series that is about dragons being used as weapons of war during the Napoleonic era. Great series, kind of a rushed flat ending. There's some good characterization but it jumps forward in time pretty much constantly and nothing has room to breath.

3/5

Just listened to Game of Thrones after being a fan of the show since it's start. I found that the book really gives the reader a great insight into the mind's of the characters, I really recommend it to any fan of the show, plus the guy who reads it does a great job (but I'm pretty sure he says Jeffery instead of Joffrey a couple of times). 5/5

re-read "Afterdark" by Haruki Murakami, this book for some reason still manages to suck me in. Short but sweet. Now onto "Wind Pinball" by the same author.

Rocannon's World by Ursula K. Le Guin – 2/5

A short book in which nothing really happens except a guy wanders around naked in the wilderness.

Planet of Exile – 3/5

Some stuff happens but it's not very interesting.

These were her two earliest books and it really shows. She had yet to really find her stride. There are some interesting ideas but she relies on cliche characters and the endings are rushed. Hopefully the next one, City of Illusion is an improvement.

The last few books I finished are:

The Name of the Wind (Patrick Rothfuss): 3/5 - Not sure why people love this book so much. It's pretty standard fantasy top to bottom, except it focuses on one character and is in first person for the majority of the book. I felt like nothing meaningful happened, I didn't really care about any of the side characters, and the comparisons to Harry Potter are laughable. Rothfuss is a good writer but this book is nothing special in terms of plot or ideas.

Annihilation (Jeff VanderMeer): 5/5 - I loved this book. It's super short and has such an amazing feeling to the writing. I know a lot of people don't like it because you get 0 answers, but it feels unique and is able to tell a very interesting story in under 200 pages which is pretty rare in the sc fi fantasy genres. Of course it is part of a trilogy, but it felt like nothing I had read before. If you like sc fi/horror/mystery (people compare it to the show Lost I guess) then give this book a try.

The Wheel of Time 4 The Shadow Rising (Robert Jordan): 4/5 - These books aren't very good. The characters repeat themselves constantly, the descriptions are pretty generic and sexist, the majority of the plot isn't anything special, and the characters behavior is infuriating at times. For some reason, I still like them. This series is my guilty pleasure, and I think book 4 might be the best one so far. Despite the long drawn out plots there is a lot of interesting character relationships, really good world building and deep lore, and Jordan always managed to make 850 pages of nothing turn into a final 50 pages of awesome action.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Philip K Dick): 5/5 - Awesome book. Waaaaaaaaaay better than Blade Runner. Really enjoyed it.

Neuromancer (William Gibson): 4/5 - A very difficult book to follow but incredibly interesting. You can see how it has influenced a lot of the cyberpunk stuff we know now. Really tough to know everything that is happening though, I had to read a chapter by chapter summary after I finished it to follow along. I enjoyed the ending quite a bit.

Currently Reading The Way of Kings (Brandon Sanderson): As of right now it's a 4/5 for me. I have about 370 pages left. This book is extremely slow. Like Wheel of Time slow except Sanderson is a better writer than Jordan was so it saves the book. I enjoy the world building, the creativity of the various magic systems, the motivation of the characters, and I really want to know how all the main characters are going to meet up/come together. However it is book 1 in a planned 10 book series that is over 1,000 pages. I still feel like after nearly 900 pages I have no clue what the actual main plot of the series is. Also I feel like for how creative and original Sanderson can be, he has a ton of really off putting stereotypes in this book, like how the main society has women learn to be scholars and read and write while the men learn to fight and be soldiers. Lame. And the dark eyed people are lower class while the light eyed people are high class. The "enemy" army is often described as having darker skin. Lame. Expected more from Sanderson but still enjoying the book. Hope the ending picks up.

The Library at Mount Char - 5/5. Great characters, engaging plot, original, and genuinely funny. It's a short, simple read, and one of the best fantasy books to come out in a long time. It loses it's momentum about 3/4th into the book, but as a first effort in what seems to be the beginning of a franchise, it has a ton of potential.

For some reason I just can't seem to get into the longer series that I'm normally most comfortable with, so I've been reading a lot of shorter novels. I read The Last Unicorn by Peter S Beagle, which I'm still sorting out my feelings about. It kind of dragged, and it's really not what I'm normally into, but there were some pretty beautiful passages and concepts. Maybe I'd like the movie better. I would give it The Only Unicorn, out of All Remaining Unicorns.

After that I jumped right into Neil Gaiman's Stardust, which I really enjoyed. It was a charming adventure that didn't overstay its welcome. After reading it I watched the movie again and decided I like that a bit better, the actors make the book's somewhat thin characters a lot more likable, and the added content only increased the story's charm for me. I'd give it roughly 80% of the innumerable stars. I think I'd like to read a little more of Gaiman's stuff after this, if anyone has any recommendations let me know.

Currently I'm reading The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy books, I'm on the third one. I absolutely loved the first book. While I was reading the passage about the sperm whale I actually had to stop for a minute just to process how funny it was, that's never happened to me while reading a book before, but it happened multiple times throughout the first one. I love the characters, the plot is absurdly fun. Fantastic book. The second one was a small step down in quality, if only because the plot was less satisfying and the jokes didn't land quite as often. However the chapter about the grammatical complexities of time travel may be some of my favorite words ever printed. Still pretty early in the third one, still waiting for it to pick up steam. I will report back with my findings.

Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut. I'm a huge fan of his work and this book did not disappoint. It lacked in some of wacky Vonnegut-ness that I've grown used to in his later works, but it still packed a hell of a punch. Still reeling from the ending, still having a bit of an existential crisis from the read... 10/10

@nophilip: I've just wrapped up Deadhouse and started Memories of Ice myself. The series clicked for me somewhere half way through Deadhouse and I've come to really appreciate Eriksons way of world building and faith in the reader to puzzle things out for themselves as you go along .

The first book was really tough for me to complete because I was afraid I wouldn't get any answers but luckily I was wrong and now I really take my time even rereading chapters from the first books incase I missed some detail is some offhand comment made casually in a conversation somewhere. I also have the maps ready on my tablet to visualize where characters are traveling and locations where things are taking place. It's no surprise hearing what Eriksons past profession was when you look at the incredibly detailed world with rich history of civilizations spanning over hundreds of thousands of years

@onenameddj: Did you like the Martian movie?

I'm currently reading Dreams and Shadow and I think it's absolutely fantastic so far.

Bo...ok?

I just finished Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions. I wouldn't call it particularly great; it was kind of straightforward, but it was enjoyable. Like the book equivalent of a not-one-of-the-great heist movies; it's fun and engaging while it lasts, but you'll forget it once it's over. Most importantly it was more of a way to prove to myself that I can just pick up a book and finish it without getting distracted or thinking about there being a better book for me to read out there. Which had been a big issue for me for some time.

Yesterday I've started Faust and have been finding it surprisingly readable. Next up I'm gonna be reading What Do You Care What Other People Think?, Feynman's second autobiography.

@billmcneal: Yeah, it was a good movie. However I think it suffers from not being in the first person so Watney's thought processes and macguyvering explanations are given less detail. But I found the characters and their actors very enjoyable and it was also nicely paced and shot. Good movie, really good book, good story.

@grizzledwolf i have read slaughterhouse 5 and loved that book... What kurt v book would you go for next?

Right now I'm finishing up the second novella in the Knight of the Seven Kingdoms series by George R.R. Martin, and I really love it, maybe even more than the mainline A Song of Ice and Fire novels. I always find that I like the smaller, comparatively "lower stakes" spin-off stories from a fictional universe more than the actual universe itself. But just like @hunter5024 posted in this thread a while ago, it's definitely giving me the Winds of Winter itch, and the ASOIAF subreddit isn't going to tide me over for much longer.

@dr_unorthadox: I'm not the person you replied to, but I'd actually recommend Mother Night, the book that @grizzledwolf was reading in their post. It's not quite as quirky as Slaughterhouse 5 but it has a lot of the humour and moral complexity of that book, and IMO its themes are a little more robust than just "war is bad" (not to say that "war is bad" is a bad theme by any means, just simple).

The Hero of Ages (Mistborn book 3) by Brandon Sanderson, 5/5

Great fantasy series. Builds up brilliantly to an epic ending.

@dr_unorthadox: Mother Night is a great read. But when people ask for Kurt recommendations I usually say 'Sirens of Titan'. If you enjoyed Slaughterhouse 5 I'm sure you would love Sirens.

I finally finished Atlas Shrugged.

I think The Fountainhead is a better "book" overall. Atlas Shrugged could be a really fascinating novel to discuss in high school but it really very desperately needed a ruthless editor. Still it was sometimes fascinating reading page after page of this person who very clearly had a lot to get off their chest. I wondered how badly the system must have wronged her and how shitty it must have been to live in a communist state in order for her to so fiercely adopt these drastically opposite ideals.

EDIT: @bambamcz although this is 24 days after your post, I just recently purchased Wind Pinball as the sole remaining Murakami novel I've yet to read. Out of all his works I really like Norwegian Wood and Hard Boiled Wonderland, but I've been meaning to re-read After Dark for quite some time as I barely remember it. Wind Pinball seems like such quintessential Murakami. It's his writing essence distilled into the purest form. A completely down to earth, almost meandering plot that manages to keep me completely transfixed in the c'est-la-vie lifestyle of his typically lethargic protagonist - yet simultaneously the whole thing has a dreamlike quality to it that you can't really put your finger on. Inconsequential - both the events that transpire and the story itself - is a great descriptor for much of his writing, yet ultimately rewarding somehow. Comfort food for the eyes and soul.

Politics aside (because once on Screened someone got mad at me for laughing at a story talking about the irony of the Atlas Shrugged movies being a financial flop), I really don't think Atlas Shrugged would be a good book to read in school because it's one of those books that just puts kids off reading. It's a badly written book. Maybe the philosophical ideas are worth discussing, (though even then I'd argue that Objectivism is a more purile philosophy than even Nihilism) but there must be better examples of Objectivist writing. I mean fuck, let them read one of Steve Ditko's insane Mr A books or something if you have to go that route. I'll be honest, that's about the extent of my Objectivist fiction knowledge.

I just finished the book Dreadnought: Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War by Robert K. Massie. Ostensibly it's about the rise of the German Empire & the naval arms race between Britain & Germany, but it covers a whole lot of stuff from the reign of Otto von Bismarck until the start of World War I, nitty gritty on domestic politics, international diplomacy, the various international crises, the Boer War, & the forming of the Entente Cordiale between the UK & France. It focuses on the major players, Bismarck, Wilhelm II, Queen Victoria, King Edward, Lord Salisbury, Henry Bannerman-Campell, Henry Asquith, Winston Churchill, Admiral Tirpitz, Admiral Fisher, etc. I really recommend it if you've any interest in 20th century history. Fantastically captivating. He brings the people to life, while also focusing on the broader issues.

He's got a follow up, Castles of Steel, which is about the naval war during WWI & I'm looking forward to reading that. I'm also waiting on Amazon sending me Liberalism: A Counter-History by Domenico Losurdo.