

Hmm.
I think maybe Illusion, by Paula Volsky, which I read many years back. She does books that basically take real-life revolutions and then do historical fantasy in a lowish-magic world version of them. Illusion was the French Revolution.
I haven’t read it in ages, but I decided that it was my favorite novel at some point, and never really had another come along that I think quite replaced it. I don’t know for sure if I’d rate it as highly now, but I remember being absolutely entranced with it. She’s got other books that do similar things for other revolutions, but that was my favorite.
George R. R. Martin’s fantasy stuff is also low-magic, and I like it. Think it might have been the last time I read any fantasy.
I’ve probably read Snow Crash, cyberpunk by Neal Stephenson, the most over the years. But while it has a lot that I like, it’s also got some pacing issues, albeit not as severe as some of his other novels — I think that stepping between action scenes and someone talking about ancient Sumerian linguistics that Stephenson researched is kind of jarring.
My fiction book reading has really fallen off over the years.
My favorite comic book…I don’t know about a single comic book. I guess the Sandman graphic novel series, by Neal Gaiman.
I’ve done much more nonfiction reading in recent years. For nonfiction…I don’t know. That seems so dependent on what it is that you want to find out about. I think I’d have a hard time ranking books by purely content-independent aspects. How do I compare a book on Native American primitive looms and weaving techniques to a book on Cold War-era submarine designs?
Yeah, the Hitchhiker’s Guide series starts out with dark humor, sure, but…it’s still irreverent and kind of done in a light-hearted way. But that series gets grimmer and grimmer the further one goes, and I just found myself not enjoying myself by the end of it. I don’t understand people who love the whole series. I just found it wearing to read towards the end.
That and the Dune series are my own top “love the first book, but the series goes downhill over the course of the series” series.
EDIT: Calvin and Hobbes did the same thing. I love a ton of the Calvin and Hobbes cartoons, but man, in his last few books-worth of material, Bill Watterson was not happy and his cartoons were just cynical and unhappy too.