re: What have you read recently, and what are you currently reading?

Anyway, recent reads for me:
Rodney Stark- God's Battalions. About the crusades, but he portrays the crusaders in a more positive light and lashes out against cynical theories such as European colonialism or it was a method of ridding Europe of surplus landless sons.

Bernard Cornwell's Saxon series (now a good BBC America show) is phenomenal if you like reading about badass warlords fighting in Danish-occupied England circa 900AD. The protagonist Uhtred is a total warrior, a man of his times, with humor and intelligence and aggressiveness and lacking tiresome concerns about morality.