Rate the last Book you read

[AussieDodger]

Recently finished this....



...and I really enjoyed it.
Kaiser Wilhelm really was a special kind of insane. Cartoon-ish even.
It blew my mind that Queen Victoria was his grandmother, that's like Batman and the Joker being father and son.

Before this book I had a little bit of sympathy for Tsar Nicholas II from the sketchy outline of him I got from high school history, but after this book, it's totally gone I'm afraid. And his wife..................


Currently at the beginning of this........



And it's quite good. Freddie as a young man is a hoot

[Mookie4ever]

Been watching WWII in Color on Netflix. Mussolini was some kinda crazy. Watch newsreels of his speechifying, it's hilarious but scary that he was taken seriously.

[AussieDodger]

Been watching WWII in Color on Netflix. Mussolini was some kinda crazy. Watch newsreels of his speechifying, it's hilarious but scary that he was taken seriously.

He was the one that randomly attacked Ethiopia because he wanted to be seen to have won a war, right?
Hilarious.

(Insert George Dubya joke here)

[daullaz]

Read the Nate Silver book, "The Signal and the Noise." Was great for the first half, then a little too dense in the second half (for me, at least). Still enjoyed it.

Also read "Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs" over the holidays and can recommend as well.

For those who like fiction, I'd recommend "Shades of Grey" (no, not that one) by Jasper Fforde. Fforde is an English writer who writes a series I like featuring a character named Thursday Next that I thoroughly enjoy, and this new series may even be better.

Politically, I'd check out "Game Change" if you haven't yet. It's so, so much more than what was in the HBO version -- the Clinton/Obama stuff takes up at least half the book by itself and it's pretty fascinating stuff.

Two more nonfiction books I read last year and thought were great were the pair by Shales and Miller about SNL and ESPN -- "Live From New York" and "Those Guys Have All the Fun." These are both essentially oral histories of these institutions told by 80-90 percent of the people involved in each throughout the years.

Another great non-fiction work was one I read last year about Watson, the Jeopardy supercomputer, called "Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything."

If you're into financial non-fiction, I loved "The Big Short" by Michael Lewis about the housing bubble. "Panic!" was also great -- Lewis was the editor of that work, but it's a collection of great writing about financial panics through the years.