What are you reading now?

I recently started reading Haruki Murakami's Sputnik Sweetheart. So now I am reading that and also casually looking through/reading Louis Wain's Catland and A Catland Companion: Classic cats by Louis Wain & many others.

I have a huge stack of books that I need to read so I still have no clue what I will be reading next.

_Refactoring to Patterns_, if you've tried one of the vaunted design patterns books and couldn't get into it try this one instead.  Very nice examples, explanations, and introduction chapters (code smells, etc.).  The author isn't afraid to build on the work of others instead of just repeat it and he makes it much easier to get your hands on things.  I've been going through a personal project while reading and I think I've improved it a lot.

_Through so Many Dangers_, memoirs of a common soldier in the French and Indian war, but with very well done annotations filling in all the details with facts and giving excerpts of officers' journals and what not, checking veracity, and noting plagiarized passages, etc.. 

I never realized just how valuable the country's waterways were back then.  The soldiers were constantly going up and down rivers and then portaging for miles just to get to another one.  Rapids could be deadly in some cases taking out boats full of men and artillery and still the waterways were constantly used.  Some forts were built right in the middle of rivers they were considered so important.

There are also action scenes, of course: Indians cutting open someone's stomach, pulling out the entrails, tying them to a tree, and making the person run around the tree.  a French fort commander treating with some Indians after a battle to try and rescue enemy soldiers from terrible deaths, and other French joining in with the Indians.  Expeditions going wrong because someone sneaked off and alerted the enemy (or so the soldier claims). 

Some interesting other details about war, like just how much a common soldier was told.  For example he'd write that they were charged with attacking the outbuildings of a fort and killing everyone within, but the general in his log had really planned his group as just a diversion to draw out the enemy.  Details about how weather or long marches or building forts as you go or strength and concentration affecting a battle, all very interesting stuff you often don't see in fiction books.