Right now I'm reading:
Bullshit Jobs (2018) by David Graeber - I loved Debt but had low expectations for this one and was reluctant to read it (I expected it would just be an extremely padded out version of the essay, which I liked). I'm enjoying it a lot more than I expected, and I'm reminded how skillful 
was at gently taking a reader along and path that is unambiguously radical, yet each individual step on the path seems casual and reasonable.
Western Marxism (2017) by Domenico Losurdo - it's good. It's Losurdo, if you've read him before this is about the same - very rigorous and orderly arguments that lead to some very powerful insights. I'm only 100 pages in so far but liking it and feel that this new English text might become a vital text once it gets read more widely
Exhalation (2019) by Ted Chiang. Science fiction short stories by one of the best to do it rn. I'm about halfway through, so far I enjoyed his first collection more (Story of Your Life and Others). I liked the first story quite a lot (The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate) but most of the rest of what I've read so has been dominated by one 100 page novella that felt kind of weak for the amount of real estate it takes up. I've heard a few of the later stories are real bangers though so maybe it will balance out.
As for what I'm excited to read next, I'm kind of spinning my wheels a bit. Might do Washington Bullets by Vijay Prishad, or maybe some Strugatsky Brothers. Open to suggestions!
I'm finally getting around to reading Settlers by J. Sakai. As a European who doesn't know much about American history (in fact you could say that most of what I knew beforehand was from reading Losurdo's Liberalism: A Counter-History last year) I find this book almost as eye-opening as Edward Said's Orientalism was for me when I read it in 2021.
Death to Amerika
I'd be interested in knowing how you think Settlers compares to Liberalism: A Counter-History
I'd say that since Settlers covers a larger timeline (at least when it comes to the US specifically), it is a great companion to Liberalism because it is able to show how volatile the boundaries of the "community of the free" that Losurdo speaks of have been across US history. For example, it shows that the use of certain minorities as slave/underpaid labour in the US has fluctuated much more than I would have previously imagined (as in: which minorities were exploited as labour and which were subject to genocide changed a lot over time; and also as in: I never had imagined that the exploitation of Asian minorities, for example, was this crucial to US settlerism on the West coast), following both European immigration into the US and the development of the country's productive forces. Settlers also crucially shows how ingrained settlerism is in the population itself, which is why socialist and even so-called "Marxist" movements dominated by settlers couldn't actually attain a truly revolutionary class-consciousness because settler ideology always won out against class solidarity between whites and blacks (which is why the latter of whom have only been admitted into labour unions in the 1920's when whites believed they could better control them and keep them as an overexploited subsection of society through their integration into their white unions, for example). And even when both books cover similar ground (for example both cover the actual reasons behind the war of independence, or those behind abolitionism in the northern US states), it's good to have a reminder of these things I've read in Liberalism that have slipped from my mind since then.
I'm only at chapter 7 so far (I'm a slow reader) so there is much more than I'm yet to learn, but I'm now ashamed that I didn't read this book earlier (which is why I compared it to Edward Said's Orientalism, which gave me the same reaction).
Thank you for the effort-post comrade
It's been on my list, I finished Liberalism: A Counter-History over the summer and it's interesting to hear you describe Settlers as a good companion piece.
I've never read Orientalism, but have been hesitant because it seems like it might be very theoretical and hard to read. The way you describe how it made you feel makes me think I should put it on the list too!
Orientalism is indeed quite theoretical, especially in the first chapter (out of three) which I'd say is the hardest part to read, since he basically lays out the scope of orientalism (which is actually the title of the chapter). But afterwards he gets into specific examples of events (like Napoleon's invasion of Egypt or the construction of the Suez canal) or authors (Renan, Sacy, Byron, Chateaubriand, Flaubert… but also Marx) to illustrate the development of orientalism in tandem to European colonialism (in anthropology and other social sciences, but also in the portrayal and use of "the Orient" in fictional works), and I felt it was considerably easier to understand, not only because of the many examples but also because I actually understood somewhat well what he meant by orientalism since he spent the hundred or so pages of the previous chapter explaining it. The third and last chapter is also fascinating, since it delves into the contemporary manifestations of orientalism, and especially the last part where he shows how Euro-American cultural influence has even spread these orientalist constructions to "the Orient" itself (through academia and consumerism, at least these are the examples which he talks about), to the point where the people there adopt that same view of themselves as "orientals": a caricature of themselves as a homogeneous "other" to the West.