1. Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon
2. Neal Stephenson - The Diamond Age
3. Joe Abercrombie - The Blade Itself (The First Law: Book One)
4. Richard Morgan - Altered Carbon
5. Terry Pratchett - The Light Fantastic
6. China Miéville - The Iron Council
7. Ian Irvine - The Curse on the Chosen (Book Two of the Song of the Tears trilogy, part of the Three Worlds Cycle)
8. Richard Dawkins - Unweaving the Rainbow
9. Joe Abercrombie - Before They Are Hanged (The First Law: Book Two)
10. Terry Brooks - The Sword of Shannara (Book One of the Sword of Shannara trilogy)
11. Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash.
12. Richard Morgan - Broken Angels
13. Raymond E Fiest - Wrath of a Mad God (Book 3 of the Darkwar saga)
14. Stephen Donaldson - The Power that Preserves (The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant Book 3)
15. Neal Stephenson - Quicksilver (Volume One of the Baroque Cycle)
It's taken me quite a while to read this book, but it was worth it. It is such an amazing book. It consists of 3 novels, Quicksilver, The King of the Vagabonds and Odalisque. The amount of real life characters in astonishing, characters such as Isaac Newton, Samuel Peyps, Benjamin Franklin (though he is still a boy in this volume) , William of Orange, King Louis XIV and many more. It's a historical novel with a focus on Natural Philosophy (Including cryptology) and its written in such a way that frequently i was left wondering which bits really happened, which were invented and which were distortions to fit the plot.
For example i know that Bonaventure Rossignol was a cryptanalyst who worked for Louis XIV and ran the Cabinet Noir but in real life he did not decrypt letters between Eliza (Fictional Character) who is the Countess de la Zeur / Duchess of Qwghlm (Fictional Islands of the coast of England) and Gottfried Leibniz (Not Fictional).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Baroque_Cycle
It also ties in to Stephenson's other book, the cryptonomicon (the name of which applies to a book on cryptology named the cryptonomicon which was written first by John Wilkins (Again real person) in Quicksilver then expanded upon over the years until it is present in Cryptonomicon. The book seems to be based upon his real book "
Mercury, or the Secret and Swift Messenger" which is about cryptology.)
