This book is a difficult read, much like a textbook. Yet for me the 'takeaways' were well worth reading this. I love books about ideas and Spinoza definitely has the ideas although his tedious and slow building of his case is offsetting for me. The selected letters portion of this volume was helpful to me as apparently Spinoza's contemporaries had a lot of difficulty understanding his thinking too. Apparently Spinoza's view of God was not as a human like body (although to be confounding he constantly referred to God as God and he -- if you don't have a body, how does God have gender???) but more like permeating Nature as God is involved with everything that exists - let's call it Nature. There are 5 parts of The Ethics and it's only in the 5th part that the reader reaches the Ethics because Spinoza builds his case so carefully. I'll just sum it up as it's about the rational mind exercising the amount of control that it can, keeping in mind that as biological beings, that control is limited. Despite him being a great philosopher and me just being me, I'm not convinced but I do find his views interesting. My rating is 4 stars while keeping in mind this is not for the casual reader.