I used to read a lot more when I was younger. I'm not quite sure when that stopped.
Of the things I have read, though...
Douglas Adams in all his myriad forms, whether that's the Hitchhiker's Guide series, or the Dirk Gently series, or even The Meaning of Liff (a dictionary of the really important words that we seem to have forgotten. It's all place names, of course, but the words do capture feelings for which I strongly believe we do need to coin actual words for sometime. I give you "ardcrony - a remote acquaintance passed off as 'a very good friend' by someone trying to impress people", or "bathel - to pretend to have read the book under discussion when in fact you've only seen the television series".
David & Leigh Eddings, The Redemption of Althalus - while most of the Eddings books are either dry and dusty fantasy military guff (e.g. The Belgariad) or mystic fantasy that's trying to feel like it has a point (see The Dreamers), Althalus stands alone as an interesting fantasy tale. I pick it up every so often and have a re-read.
Jasper Fforde, the Thursday Next series (The Eyre Affair onwards) - this one gets decidedly meta in the vein of a 'literature detective' called Thursday Next, in an alternate version of 1985, whose normal job is dealing with rogue copies of Shakespeare or Dickens, until it gets infinitely more meta and Next finds herself inside the book of Jane Eyre, which in this universe... plays out differently. And Next may have to do something about that. On a side note, when Eoin Colfer came to write the sixth and so far final Hitchhiker's Guide book based on Adams's notes, I wished he hadn't, because as much as Artemis Fowl is a fun enough series, Colfer is far too normal and by the book, and not nearly observational humourist enough - Fforde on the other hand feels like he would have gotten into the spirit of the thing and been delightfully bonkers while making those dry sardonic observations.
Mike Carey's Felix Castor series (The Devil You Know onwards). Carey is originally a comic writer - wrote for Hellblazer and Lucifer, and ended up writing his own novel series. The universe is, broadly, our own - except in the late 2000s, the dead have risen. Plenty of people see ghosts, and unsurprisingly, came forth the exorcists, of which Felix himself is one, dispelling ghosts with a tin whistle. But he has some scars from his travels, and some of them almost end up killing him. More than once. What's really neat is that it's a five book series and by the time it's done, it goes full circle. I don't know if it was *planned* like that but it's a finished series and by the time it's done, everything wraps up cleanly.
Unfortunately I have a library of unread books, just like my library of unplayed games...
