Currently reading
Vineland (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)
Tristes Tropiques
Richard III
The Dwarf
The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen
Labyrinths
Giotto to Dürer: Early Renaissance Painting in the National Gallery
Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics
Gravity's Rainbow
A Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon's Novel
Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (American Empire Project)
This book is not as rich or as original as "Sorrows of Empire" -- it is more journalistic, and less sustained. The material is also largely familiar to anyone who has read the newspapers or any books over the period concerned (Iraq). Finally, written before the Financial Crisis -- the GFC, aka, "The Great Fuck-up" -- the perspective has been somewhat overtaken by events. Johnson, for example -- with the image of the collapse of the Soviet Union in mind - thought that the extension of empire would precede bankruptcy. He must have been quite surprised to discover that he had it backwards.
At any rate, it is sad to note his passing tonight:
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20101123a2.html