Finished The Big Short. Very enjoyable read, but I don't really see how the movie can do it justice without some serious handwaving to jargon. This week I read the first 4,5 hours of Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning by Timothy Snyder as mentioned by b_b. It's been a while since I read a good history book and while this is definitely a good book, it constantly reminds me how little I actually know of the geopolitical landscape before the Cold War.
I've read half a dozen books about WWI, two on the Bolsheviks, and a few WWII to late 20th c histories, and I still don't think I have a great grasp of the geopolitics of the world. Right now I'm reading an expansive history of Japan from the Shogunal time on, and the most recent chapter was about how the Napoleonic wars affected Japan (rather profoundly, it turns out, since Napoleon's brother became the regent of your fair homeland, thereby screwing up relations with the one European country that Japan had relations with). The shitty thing about learning something is that you then have to learn a lot more to understand the thing you just learned. It's a vicious cycle.