A friend recently asked me via email what books I’ve been liking over the past few years, and I figured I’d copy/paste my answer here. Some of these I may have recommended before.

• Gideon the Ninth and its sequels (three of four books are published) is a spectacular, extremely genre-bending (sci fi / fantasy / horror / queer fiction / mystery / etc), and very funny book that Charles Stross described as “Lesbian necromancers explore a haunted gothic palace in space! Decadent nobles vie to serve the deathless emperor! Skeletons!”
• There’s an interesting (very long!) work, Project Lawful, which is — a bit hard to describe. It’s written collaboratively in the form of a web forum, and is sort of partway between a novel and a role-playing game. It’s about someone from an advanced society ending up in a D&D world, in a deeply evil country ruled by devils, and trying to work with them. Lots of BDSM although that’s skippable if you’d prefer. It’s by the same author as Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, and if you haven’t read that one before I’d probably start there unless the subject matter of the first one seems more appealing.
• Children of Time (first of a trilogy) is sci fi, and one of the best books I’ve ever read at presenting aliens that aren’t just humans with funny foreheads but are truly alien…although they are based on kinds of animals you’re familiar with.
• qntm is a mostly-online writer, kind of horrorish but often more like meta-horror, who I’ve been really into in the past year or so. His short stories are terrific (this is probably his best known), and my favorite book of his (also free online) is There is no Antimemetics Division, set in the massively collaborative alternate reality of the SCP Foundation.