Currently reading: Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising,

(via Penguin)

"Allah!"
With that shrill cry, three Muslim terrorists blow up a key Soviet oil complex, creating a critical oil shortage that threatens the stability of the USSR. 

To offset the effects of this disaster, members of the Politburo and the KGB devise a brilliant plan of diplomatic trickery - a sequence of events designed to pit the NATO allies against each other - a distraction calculated to enable the Soviets to seize all the oil in the Persian Gulf. 

But as this spellbinding story of international intrigue and global politics nears its climax, the Soviets are faced with another prospect, one they hadn't planned on: a full-scale conflict in which nobody can win.

Red Storm Rising, published in 1986 by Tom Clancy is an excellent book if military thrillers are your thing and just a good thriller in general. As the above blurb indicates, the plot centers around a non-nuclear World War III between the Warsaw Pact and NATO. It's more than a little outrageous that the Soviets would start such a conflict just so they can make a grab for oil in the Middle East, but it makes for some exciting action and drama.

The thing that originally caught my attention about Red Storm Rising and led to me buy this book a decade ago was that this book was required reading at the Naval War College, which is interesting. Unfortunately, it took me about a decade - after several false starts - to finally dig into the book, given that my interests rested with scifi and fantasy fiction. So far, I'm realizing how much of a mistake not reading this sooner was.