I have to second the original poster's suggestion of the Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian. I get a new one every year for Christmas (waiting for #4 this year) and gobble it up in about a week or two. Fantastic writing style and a fun read. I would compare it to Tolkien as far as the richness of the language (with the exception of there being no "made up" languages
).
Received
Freakonomics as a gift, and I'm slowly making my way through that. The book contains some very creative parallels drawn between seemingly unrelated events. Unfortunately, the subject matter can seem quite negative (crack dealers, abortion, real estate agents), which is why I don't pick it up too much.
Other than that, I read a lot of programming books because as of late I have an insatiable thirst for that kind of learning. I find the books from O'Reilly Publishing to be some of the most helpful as far as learning a new software language (Perl, PHP, and MySQL are my current interests).