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
This book is a bit harder to read (though it reads well) than vol. I -- largely because of its subject matter which, until the final chapter, necessarily takes a topical approach -- and because so much of the specifics of fascist and nazi social organization (such as the educational organization, the Italian's dopolavoro and Germany's Kraft durch Freude, social policy, etc. etc.) offers this reader (at least) the picture of a vast and squalid tedium. For all that, there of much of great interest, pertinent and fascinating aperçus and insights scattered throughout; he treatment of the economic material is intelligent and, indeed, quite masterful -- something quite rare in a political historian....; The final chapter -- on the march to war (Anschluss, Munich, Poland) -- is brief and presupposes some knowledge, but is a superb synthesis.
In general, Evans is so thoroughly steeped in the archival material and in the secondary literature in German, that he is invulnerable to the trivialities that infect so much recent American scholarship on this period. At the same time, he is a liberal (unlike Niall Ferguson) and somehow managed to extricate himself from the smug self-satisfaction and intellectual world-weariness that infects so much of Oxbridge -- esp. in my own field.
If one can skim through the sections that might otherwise bog this or that particular reader down -- the march will be well-rewarded.