I am a (mostly) retired bookworm. Back when I had time to read fiction, my favorite genres were fantasy and science fiction. Nowadays I mostly read collections of short stories, but I try to keep up with my favorite authors.

At the top of any list of my favorite fiction must come the three series by Julian May about the Galactic Milieu. These books create an epic science fiction world mixed with swords and fantasy, and are some of the few books I have found that give a delightfully full treatment of psionic powers. May does a wonderful job of weaving many small stories and incidents into a complex larger picture, creating engaging and likable characters to populate her believable and fascinating world. If I were an author, these are the books I'd like most to have written.

The Saga of Pliocene Exile

• The Many-Colored Land
• The Golden Torc
• The Nonborn King
• The Adversary

Intervention

• The Surveillance
• The Metaconcert

The Galactic Milieu Trilogy

• Jack the Bodiless
• Diamond Mask
• Magnificat

When my fantasy reading tastes are lighter, my favorite author is Terry Pratchett, creator of the Discworld series, an on-going string of hilarious stories about magic and happenings on a flat earth that travels through space on the backs of four elephants, who in turn stand upon the shell of the star turtle Great A'Tuin.

Another prolific writer I enjoy is Anne McCaffery . She is best known for her highly detailed world of Pern, which I do enjoy, but my favorite books by her are those centered around the idea of powerful psychics. These deal with the ideas of telepathy and telekinesis, and how Earth's society would change in response to an organized group that possessed these abilities. They are very interesting speculative fiction, especially the Pegasus books.
To Ride Pegasus
Pegasus in Flight
Pegasus in Space
The Rowan
Damia
Lyon's Pride
Damia's Children

Robert A. Heinlein's speculative fiction is also often fascinating, and he wrote a great deal of it. I enjoy most of his work, but my favorite volume by him is Assignment In Eternity, a collection of four short stories in a similar vein to McCaffery's Pegasus set.

Roger Zelazny also wrote many books before his death. His series about the world of Castle Amber and the Courts of Chaos is excellent, with interesting and mythic characters and ideas about the existence of infinite worlds.

Two books by Robin McKinley, The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown, are among my favorites of young adult fantasy. The Hero and the Crown is fabulous, both in conception and in story-telling. The Blue Sword shares the excellent writing, but the story and characters are less interesting to me.

The books by Steven Brust about Vlad Taltos and his world are fascinating for their engaging and different writing style, as well as their complex and consistant world. The writing style Brust uses, especially in The Phoenix Guards and Five Hundred Years After, includes a subtle accent of thought and speech. After finishing these books I felt as though I had spent time with people speaking another language, and had picked up some of their grammar in my own thought patterns. It was very interesting.