[tarboreus]

Some great suggestions here, but mostly well within the engineer comfort zone (Adams, Gaiman, Tolkien, Asimov, Pratchett, Weir, Sanderson, Rothfuss). If you're feeling like trying something a little different, I'd highly recommend Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. It's historical fiction set in Tudor England, and follows Oliver Cromwell who is a kind of fixer for Henry VIII. Beautiful language, but Mantel also has an ability to enter into the mindset of the times in a way that can be striking and alien.

I have a fear that engineers on here are all reading and watching the same things. Intellectual monocultures are boring and potentially fragile. Let's make 2017 the year where HN reads a few books that aren't about wizards or engineers in space.