The unrelated trio of Red Notice, Thieves of State and TraumaZone is going to be a bl00's review.

I did the whole of David Brin's Uplift Saga. It should be more popular than it is, but it isn't because the story is random, forgettable and depressing. You put in an awful lot of work in an awfully rich environment and get "the answer is 42." David Brin doesn't so much as finish a book as get bored with it and put it down. This is probably why I also hate the Culture Series and the Hyperion Cantos.

If we're going for "this year", David Gelles "The Man Who Broke Capitalism" is the sort of thing only I enjoy, but I enjoyed it. "Under the Streets of Nice" is a great, true, Ken Follett book about a bank heist. I did "The Body Keeps the Score" and it broke me. I followed up with Adam Grant's "Think Again" and Peter Levine's "In An Unspoken Voice" and all three books are utterly devoid of help or advice for anyone in my situation.

"Made for Love" the book is not the same as "Made for Love" the series, but it's adjacent.

If you want to read an entire book on embargos, "The Economic Weapon" is such a book.

Thomas Rid's "Active Measures" is a seminal look at how the Russians manipulate the world, principally because the Russians are the only ones employing disinformation campaigns and have been since before WWI.

I read two of Peter Zeihan's books mostly so I can tell anyone who brings him up how full of shit he is.

I read Graeber's "The Dawn of Everything" and it's legitimately great. I read "A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century" and it's a libertarian polemic written by idiots.

I am currently reading Gillian Flynn's "Sharp Objects", having finished the HBO miniseries. It's not spectacular, but I see how it landed her a book deal. I also suspect that the genesis of that entire career was a particularly haunting song off Curve's last album.