Descending order:

• Radiance (re-reading for my annotated transcription)
• Shigurui (review)
• Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes (review)
• Spice and Wolf, Book 1 (review)

• Qualia the Purple; copying over my interim review from MAL:

  Qualia the Purple was quite the curious read. I started it after being linked it as possibly the only example of manga discussing 'philosophical zombies', then I noted the second main character had purple eyes and began reading it to see if she'd be a hafu for my essay (the art is not great and the story was not compelling enough to keep me reading), then I kept reading because it seemed like it was improving into a light fluffy Haruhi Suzumiya-style manga with some superficial science, then it veered hard into Higurashi-level horror, then it did some shallow quantum mechanics, then it veered into really good hard SF on an almost Greg Egan level with a remarkable take on Lagrangians & Fermat's Principle of Least Action (the closest I can think of are Chiang's "Story of Your Life" and Egan's "The Infinite Assassin"), and then impressed me even more by observing that quantum indeterminacy seems like it should apply to the past as well, so by the end of chapter 12 I'm a little stunned at how this quirky yet mediocre manga has leveled up into relatively hard SF and I'm really wondering how the rest of the story is going to play out.

  (Reading the MAL forums for it, I get the impression a fair number of readers are just glossing over the QM & scientific parts and not appreciating them, but oh well.)

• The Wallet of Kai Lung (review)
• Vader's Little Princess

I also read through Glenn Cook's Black Company-verse, so I'll rank them separately to keep things clear (descending order):

• #2, Shadows Linger (review)
• #1, The Black Company (review)
• #6, Dreams of Steel (review)
• #7, Bleak Seasons (review)
• #9, Water Sleeps
• #5, Shadow Games (review)
• #4, The Silver Spike
• #8, She is the Darkness
• #3, The White Rose (review)
• #10, Soldiers Live (review)

Started reading The Name of the Wind. The main character behaves a lot like HPMoR!Harry in many ways (although maybe the causation is in the other direction), I like the magic system, and there's a decent amount of lampshade-hanging. And the dialogue is surprisingly funny. Generally recommend.

http://www.sagaofsoul.com/ for all your "magical girls who wonder why their attacks are much less powerful than the mass-energy of the matter they can apparently create, who teleport to space so they can look at the Earth, and who synthesize unbihexium so scientists can get a look at it" needs.

Brandon Sanderson continues to be impressive. He's started a new series with The Stormlight Archive, and it looks great so far. Warbreaker was also really good.

Recommendations

Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton. Briefly summarized as, "Maybe I would be able tolerate reading Jane Austen and the like if all of her characters had been dragons."

Embassytown by China Mievelle. This a book that is primarily idea-driven and secondarily milieu-driven, with plot and character far behind. The pacing is a little slow to start, but it picks up. I guess I would says it's a work of speculative fiction about philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, which is unusual, and I thought it was quite well-executed. I'm now reading Kraken, which is ok, but not awesome, so based on my sample so far, definitely go with Embassytown if you're only going to pick one of his books.

I have been making my way through all of Iain M. Banks work. The Algebraist (not a Culture novel) was quite good. All of the Culture novels I've read have been good, but if I had to rank them (best to... least best), it would go Consider Phlebas, Look to Windward, The Player of Games, Matter, Use of Weapons

Also working my way through all of Pratchett, but I assume I don't need to recommend that here.

Antirecommendation:

The Rapture of the Nerds It's transhumanist literature, so it should appeal thematically. Unfortunately, I think they made a conscious choice to convey the sense of an accelerating future by having the plot jump around frenetically and semi-randomly, and I hated this conceit. The parts taking place while the protagonist is an upload are pretty good, but you have to get through a lot of awfulness to get there.

I went through most of the Heinlein's Future history series and some other writings. It's very very uneven, even within a single novel. The dialog is often gripping and witty, at other times long and boring. Technical and scientific descriptions tend to ramble on as if it were a textbook or a manual. At his best, Heinlein has several quotable sentences on every page, it his worst, you can skip whole chapters. He generally sucks bad at writing endings, even to otherwise excellent novels.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (not generally considered a part of the series) is one of those I liked most. Stranger in a Strange Land was great at tmes, but spoiled by the occult parts and the meaningless (to me) ending. Time Enough for Love is probably the most uniformly well written, if you excise the genetics babbling, though the ending, again, could have been better. Whoever were his editors, they never did a good job. Still, as sci-fi goes, it aged well, except for computer-related references and plot twists.

His rather anarchist and libertarian political ideas did not grate on me. This was a welcome contrast with Ayn Rand, whose novels I found impossible to get through.

Just finished reading K.J. Parker's Devices and Desires. What struck me at first was "Eh, no, medieval people didn't think like that," but after mentally shifting gears to thinking of it as an author tract like HPMOR, with modern characters in a quasi-historical setting, it was much more enjoyable.

I first read Metagame by Sam Landstrom around 2008. At the time, I was an effectively broke high school student who had decided that I liked AIVAS from the Pern series and wanted more of that, which got me pointed to science fiction, despite the school library making it impossible to tell science fiction from the literary kind by shelving them in the same place. Which meant that, by default, I ended up wandering the Internet looking for long science fiction. Metagame was, at the time, available on the author's website as full text, and I came out the other end of the novel most of a day later with my mind blown. And then I reread it...

The short version of the premise is that some sort of almost-Friendly AI has taken over the world, attached everything a human can do to a point system, and offers immortality (by brain transplant; there's no uploading, apparently) to the people who "win" the game by amassing massive point totals (keep in mind this is 2008, well before "gamification" hit mainstream thought) - but the Game also has zones and rules about how to kill people, and thus "losing" and "dying" are the same concept. Also, there are clones that are morally equivalent to "expensive pieces of furniture" and with ~95% human genetics but are clearly sentient and sapient at human-like levels. These concepts collide (sometimes awkwardly); plot ensues.

Metagame is very clearly a book written in service of its worldbuilding, rather than the other way around, and this shows as occasionally excessively "tellish" prose, occasional protagonist idiot-balls, and a general sense that the book does not actually pick up until Act/Part II (did I mention it was divided up into parts that exactly match modern interpretations of Greek three-act structure?) It is also an interesting read when interpreted as a almost-FAI weirdtopia where the original AI seed value programmers still retained the idea that human meat was special and privileged, thus preventing a) uploading and b) nonhumans with human-level intelligence from being recognized as moral agents.

It's not a book, but it doesn't really fit in the other categories either...

Shadow Unit is quite good, though I wish more of it was available in e-reader format. Think Criminal Minds meets The X-Files.