Lois McMaster Bujold is a Science Fiction & Fantasy writer who is being devoured by half of the English Dept. where I work. Stong characters, strong plots, very little tech, they are hard to put down.

I like a lot of the Young Adult fiction being mentioned. I read almost all after I was 30 and very few in school. I think the coming of age story has a lot of appeal regardless of age. The good ones don't write down to their audience but are often not as pretentious as so called serious adult fiction.

Menolly, Dragon Singer is a special favorite for me too. I really like McCaffery's Pern books. I like some of her others as well, but several of the series have slipped a lot as they've go along. The Pern books almost all still have a spark.