Crow Road - Iain Banks
I haven't caught up on all of Banks' non-sf material, but this is the most normal of those I've read. And (probably consequentially) the least special or memorable, if far from the worst. (Neither Whit and The Business did much for me at all.) Very good writing but by the end you might as well have read John Irving or something.

Quicksilver - Neal Stephenson
Stephenson continues to cement his title of Pynchon Lite. If you want historical fiction set in pre-Revolutionary New England and post-Interregnum Old England, with Newton and Leibniz as major supporting characters, dramatizing and personalizing the revolution in world-view that the scientific method represents, and you want in thousands of pages of prose by a didactic sf writer, littered with random historical in-jokes, this is probably your book.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - J.K. Rowling
Maybe a touch off the peak of book four? Maybe not. If she can finish out the series at this level she'll have earned the praise that she's already gotten. The plot elements that sounded tedious when people described them to me as I bounded across the room to physically prevent them from spoiling the books happen so quickly and in such deftly unexpected ways that all of the characters remain engaging and sympathetic (except of course for that frog-faced lady).

A Fire Upon the Deep - Vernor Vinge
The first half is the exciting, page-turning infected-universe story that Peter Hamilton could never tell because his words get in the way. Vernor Vinge measures out the precise quantity of verbiage needed and uses it all to perfection. Sadly, his plot can't keep up the pace for all seven hundred pages, and the characters get stuck at halfway to interesting.