Oooooh dear. If I was alone in a library with you.. Rarr.

Anyways, I tend to drift towards older SF&F (60s-70s) because I'm a hopeless elitist and the moment I realized that other kids liked reading YA in middle school, I scorned that shit so fast it actually caused a sonic boom in the library section I left.

I do read more contemporary stuff of course, but it tends to be a bit more obscure. I actually regret not finding and reading GoT before HBO made the show, because I'm now deprived of boasting that I found before others did.

Anyways. If you want something short and sweet and a little thought provoking from a modern perspective,: [url=http://www.tor.com/2009/12/08/the-horrid-glory-of-its-wings/]Elizabeth Bear is currently my darling[/url] because of her prose and how she does a delightful fantastical realism. 

And if you want to read something that is so venerable that it shaped D&D itself, yet is still so relevant that people are writing about it now 60's years after it's original publication, (with a recent collection of fanfics written by esteemed writers such as Gaiman and Martin) I entreat you to read [url=http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/dec/05/fantasy-tales-dying-earth-jack-vance]Tales of a dying earth.[/url] It is honestly one of my favorite book series of all times. They published an omnibus recently, so you get all of them in one place.

Watership Down is also another one of my favorites, it's prose is phenomenal and it is so powerful that you forget it's about bunnies, really.