I'm reading China Mieville's novel The City & The City, which is fascinating and riveting and wildly original and brilliant at exploring the story's odd setting through the form of a mystery novel. If the last third of the book doesn't let me down, this will outdo Jedediah Berry's The Manual of Detection as the most eminently readable novel using detective fiction as the core on which to build a bizarrely inventive world I've read this year. In fact, it's high time I got back to it.
I read The City & The City as part of the Hugo voting packet and it got my vote. I loved it. It was my first China Mieville book but I'll be reading more in 2011. Perdido Street Station will be the first.
I've got The Manual of Detection on my shelf but I haven't gotten to it yet. I saw the author read at SFinSF almost a year ago and enjoyed it a lot but just haven't moved the book up to the top of my reading list yet.
I just finished my reread of Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. Borrowing a phrase from within the book, I can't help but describe it as fractally brilliant; that is, any particular piece, examined carefully, is just as brilliant as the whole. Just a ridiculously awesome piece of writing.
Cryptonomicon is one of my favorite books of all time. It's freaking huge and I remember thinking when I was half way through I could have read a couple other novels in that time and I still wasn't where what the main plot of Cryptonomicon was but I didn't care because I was enjoying the ride so much.