I enjoyed Ivanhoe, and kept stopping every page or so to look something up. I ended up writing a dictionary of the oddball terms I kept encountering. Great for Scrabble words.
I'm posting here from the TV thread because it seemed more related to books than to tv.
I've never read anything by Len Deighton, so maybe I'll pick up SS-GB, but I get the impression that the book leaves you hanging as much as the tv series did. I'm reading Get Shorty now as I've never read any Elmore Leonard books (or at least I think I haven't). The movie follows the book much more closely than the tv series did, but both are very good.
Did you ever go to the bookstore and buy a book only to find you already own it? I must admit this has happened to me more than once. But I don't have any Deighton novels at home, for sure. I'm also in the middle of Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy, but that's a topic for another day. It's very good and very long. I also have to keep looking stuff up. But it's beautifully written.