Given your preferences, I was about to recommend those YA Tamora Pierce books with the lady knight and then hit the big wall of Already On the List.
You've probably read more Vonnegut than I have, but Sirens of the Titan and Cat's Cradle are both exemplary works from his collection. Bonus literary merit!
Connie Willis' To Say Nothing of the Dog is a hilarious, terribly British time travel novel in the 'comedy of errors' style of Wodehouse and Jerome K. Jerome. It's one of the few comfort books from the SF genre that cram into my tiny studio at college. God is in the details. So are cats.
I rather liked two of Tanya Huff's books--Fifth Quarter and No Quarter, a surprisingly philosophical little duo about an assassin, her brother, and the snarky young man who possesses him. I'd recommend that you stay away from the other books in that series, though she has a SF/mystery series out that I remember liking as well.
Melanie Rawn does decent, if sprawling, political fantasy, with shiny Michael Whelan cover art.
Don't pick up Terry Goodkind unless you want The Fountainhead with more magic.
I adored Lackey and McCaffrey as an angsty preteen, then graduated to adoring Robert Jordan as an angsty high school student. O, such sordid confessions as these!
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You've probably read more Vonnegut than I have, but Sirens of the Titan and Cat's Cradle are both exemplary works from his collection. Bonus literary merit!
Connie Willis' To Say Nothing of the Dog is a hilarious, terribly British time travel novel in the 'comedy of errors' style of Wodehouse and Jerome K. Jerome. It's one of the few comfort books from the SF genre that cram into my tiny studio at college. God is in the details. So are cats.
I rather liked two of Tanya Huff's books--Fifth Quarter and No Quarter, a surprisingly philosophical little duo about an assassin, her brother, and the snarky young man who possesses him. I'd recommend that you stay away from the other books in that series, though she has a SF/mystery series out that I remember liking as well.
Melanie Rawn does decent, if sprawling, political fantasy, with shiny Michael Whelan cover art.
Don't pick up Terry Goodkind unless you want The Fountainhead with more magic.
I adored Lackey and McCaffrey as an angsty preteen, then graduated to adoring Robert Jordan as an angsty high school student. O, such sordid confessions as these!