Means different things to different people. My geek friends celebrate Pi Day and Einstein's birthday. But as much as I try not to dwell on it, it's the anniversary of my older half-brother's (self-inflicted) death. There's some sadness of course but this day mostly makes me angry. Angry at him for taking the coward's way out. Angry at family members for celebrating him. Why? Because even though he was my brother, he was kind of an ass. Married one girl after getting her pregnant, cheated with his babysitter and later married her. Then cheated again with some other chick. I think he made an effort to be a good dad but as a general human being he wasn't fantastic. The word 'irresponsible' doesn't quite do him justice. Now, his young children are fatherless in the worst way and relatives on facebook keep posting how they love him and miss him and he's an angel... blah blah blah. The worst is seeing his 2nd wife doing it. Who was dating someone else, either concurrently with his death or nearly immediately after and who has remarried since. I'm sick of her pretending she loved him and sick of everyone pretending he was great. I want to caps lock yell it on FB, but I won't, I'll get it out of my brain and onto the page here, instead.
RIP Jay, you were kind of a jerk, but you were family and I loved you anyway.
Personally, I think Murakami is horribly over-rated, but he's a current literary darling, so Kafka on the Shore or Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World might be worth a look.
One big recommendation: China Miéville is the most thrilling voice to hit fantasy in years and years. Brilliant stylist; his prose easily equals Chip Delany or Ursula Le Guin, surpasses (imho) George Martin or Gene Wolfe.
But not for everyone. Not Tolkienesque elves & hobbits, no kinda-like-rural Englands, no monolithic all-bad Dark Lords. You're more likely to find characters derived from Egyptian myth (like the Khepri--a race of artists with human bodies and the heads of scarabs), Hindu epics, even a version of the cactuars from Final Fantasy video games.
The core setting of his best known novels-- Perdido Street Station; The Iron Council; The Scar--is the immense, relentlessly magical city of New Crobuzon. This is a steampunk world--more intense than, but similar to, the setting of Fullmetal Alchemist.
And Miéville's very political. His paradigm (again, like Fullmetal) is that magic will inevitably be co-opted by oligarchs, militarized, and used against the masses; while artists, scientists & outlaws invent new magics to fight back.
Result: in New Crobuzon, class warfare is at once wondrous, gorgeous, psychedelic, and dripping with eldritch horror...
Bottom line: if you like Moorcock, Tim Powers, Thomas Disch, M. John Harrison, J.G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss, Michael de Larrabeiti, Emma Bull, or Kelly Link, you might love Miéville. commented on Mar 21
This will seem odd at first, for Lady Dorothy Dunnett didn't write sf/f. She wrote a hugely epic and epically romantic historical series: the six-volume Lymond Chronicles and an eight-volume prequel, The House of Niccolò
This isn't a personal recommendation: I could never get into them. But that's true of much romance.
What I can say is this: every female fantasy author and editor whom I've known even slightly has been absolutely madly in love with Dunnett's novels. Given that her hardcore fans have included writers like Marion Zimmer Bradley and Anne McCaffrey, it's likely that Dunnett may be (directly or by one degree of separation) the single greatest influence on romantic fantasy in the past half century. For that reason alone... commented on Mar 21