Here are some books I'm reading right now.

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. This one is for my evolutionary psychology reading group. I first read this when I was 18 or so (25 years ago) and I remember that it was a huge revelation. I felt that I had a good understanding of why evolution worked the way it did. Since then, it seems like Dawkins' ideas have become an integral part of the general understanding of evolution, and nothing in this book seems surprising any more. I guess you also have to get past the emotional connotations of terms like "selfish" used in this context.

The Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant. I'm working on The Age of Louis XIV right now. I've been reading these books for 15 years or so - I pick the current one up, read a few chapters, then put it down and forget about it for 6 months. They are so well written, though, that it's a pleasure to read them. How can one person (or two, for the later ones) do so much research and know so much history to create a huge work like this? I can see somebody cranking out 10,000 pages of fantasy or mysteries in a few years, but for every page Durant wrote he must have done hours or days of research.

Outlaws and Lawmen of the West by M.A. Macpherson and Eli MacLaren. This is basically fluff - short biographies of a number of Wild West outlaws like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. An interesting point they make is that the era of the Wild West started after the Civil War, due to a large population of young men who had been trained in violence and whose lives had been upset striking out to seek their fortune. Many areas were newly settled and there were few institutions that could effectively restrain such lawlessness. It ended around 1900, when the frontier had more or less disappeared and the forces of order had taken control.