Life is cyclic and recently I've pretty much abandoned my longtime latenight geek sessions for the simple pleasure of reading. I'm still geeky about it, of course, since what I am reading for pleasure is almost exclusively in Microsoft Reader format and read on my PocketPC. You can't beat that configuration, really, using the PocketPC to illuminate the room before you hit the sack, then turn the screen luminosity down low to read without disturbing the Wifey. The portability of my personal library on a PocketPC is another thing I enjoy, plus all of the little functions in Microsoft Reader like the library display and book navigation menu which includes going to your most recent page.
I re-read Stephen Ambrose's Band of Brothers, which I mentioned before, then went on a Jeff Shaara jag, starting with Gone for Soldiers: A Novel about the Mexican-American War. (Fictionwise link. You have to shop around to get MS Reader versions to find out if they exist at all. I didn't see Gone for Soldiers at Amazon in MS Reader format. You also need to shop around for the best prices, since prices of eBooks vary widely.) Gone for Soldiers traces the early days of Robert E. Lee, Grant, Andrew Jackson and other Civil War leaders, describing the war with Mexico in the 1840's. Very entertaining. I wanted to read more Shaara and chose To the Last Man: A Novel of the First World War. I'm only at page 1475 (3925 pages total--Pocket PC pages!), but am enjoying this Shaara novel even more than Gone for Soldiers.
Interesting Shaara sidenote, here's an Amazon List of Shaara Military Historical Fiction in Chronological Order. Interesting WWI sidenote, there's a very informative 4-DVD set called The First World War. (Netflix link.) I watched the first so far. A very good documentary.
After finishing To The Last Man, if the cycle hasn't brought me back to latenight geeking instead of reading for pleasure, I'll be going into the future, starting with something in Richard K. Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs trilogy. There was an excellent podcast with Richard Morgan interviewed by Moira Gunn for ITConversations that peaked my interest in Richard Morgan's work, particularly in his talking about how in the future it wasn't a big deal to swap out physical parts or containers for people, but it was a big deal that you could never duplicate the "individual." That makes perfect sense to me from my seat here at 1000 feet up.
Another futuristic book in the queue is Accelerando by Charles Stross. I heard it mentioned by (I think) by Vernor Vinge in his keynote at Accelerating Change 2005. If my understanding is correct, Accelerando is a novelization of the Singularity and how accelerated technological change permeates society with its benefits and consequences. I haven't found an MS Reader version of it yet. Might have to break down and read the hardcover version.
Speaking of the Singularity, I'm looking at Kurzweil's "The Singularity Is Near" sitting on a tower PC by my desk, under "Secrets of Word-of-Mouth Marketing," "Freakonomics", and "The Big Moo." All in hardback, all also in the queue, that is, in my Nordic Track Book Club queue. That's a different queue, of course.