Spellbound by Ru Emerson.

This is a retelling of Cinderella, and it's notable for sensible characters (some bad emotional habits, but they're thinking about what they're doing a lot of the time). There's care taken with practical details-- no matter how much of a hurry you're in, you still need to get the horse ready to be ridden.

I also liked it because some of the scary bits were distinctively scary.... and there's a quite an unusual take on the prince searching for the mystery woman.

• The Causal Angel - Hannu Rajaniemi, Conclusion to the Quantum Thief trilogy. I enjoyed it maybe 80% as much as the first book.
• Anvil of the Stars - Greg Bear, sequel to the The Forge of God.

• The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly - Sun-mi Hwang, touching contemporary fable.
• Nightfall - Isaac Asimov, old enough to be cliche and predictable despite being original for its time.
• A Song of Ice and Fire (1-5) - G R R Martin, took a while to read and addictive. Stays interesting if he explores a character you can relate to.
• Guards! Guards!, Going Postal, and Making Money - Terry Pratchett, fun Discworld novels.

• Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic
• Poul Anderson's Brain Wave
• Zelazny's A Night in the Lonesome October
• Paolini's Eragon (review)

I recently picked up the (commercial; I understand there are fan translations in the wild) English translations of the Witcher books by Andrzej Sapkowski as airplane reading, partly because I found the games interesting but poor at explaining background but mostly because I'd woken up at 5 AM to catch my flight and didn't have the bandwidth to keep slogging through the dense mock-Elizabethan prose of The Worm Ouroboros.

The series is subversive fantasy with a heavy dose of folktale influence, somewhere between Gregory Macguire's books and A Song of Ice and Fire in tone, and while it doesn't add much to that subgenre that I haven't seen before, it does pull it off competently and from a perspective I'm not used to. (I suspect this latter has something to do with its Polish origins.) It does hew a little too close to genre convention in places; there are good narrative reasons to have nonhumans running around, for example, but not to pull in the full D&D-style demihuman panoply. On the other hand, it's unusually good at grounding its genre: nations fall and are created, for example, over periods of a few decades rather than staying static for Tolkienian centuries or millennia. Monsters are treated as rare and dangerous animals rather than unique aberrations. Individual martial skill is valuable but easily neutralized by luck or fatigue or weight of numbers. Magicians approach their craft more as scientists than as sages or superheroes. It's a fairly refreshing take and I'd like to see more of it.

The weakest point's probably the translations tapped for Kindle, which are noticeably inconsistent and pretty clunky in places. Characterization's competent but nothing to write home about.

• There is a new Robin Hobb out as of today (in the UK, anyway), "Fool's Assassin". An automatic buy on the strength of the previous novels for me; will report further once I have finished it.