book and cheese recs pls
Multiple posts in one week, omg!

1) I'd like to start reading "for fun" again. I haven't read for fun except very sporadically since high school. In college I got eaten by classwork and workwork and just didn't have time. After college, I was working as a copy editor -- eight hours a day of mostly reading stuff, with little inclination to continue once home. I just never picked up the habit again.

Growing up, I read a lot of fantasy fiction. (Largely Dragonlance.) Anymore, in what may come as a shock to those who have read my own fiction, I don't seem to find the genre appealing, by and large. Though I like Neil Gaiman, so not all hope is lost. I think, honestly, my reticence is mostly due to the fact I don't read very quickly, so I want to be reasonably sure whatever I read will have been worth the time I invested in it.

So I'm looking for book recs, willing to peek at other genres, more than willing to read nonfiction, though I'm more of a "check out this interesting information!" than a "here's what I think, and why you should think it, too!" kinda gal. SO what has knocked your literary socks off lately?

2) I am also looking for cheese recs. Time and again, we will pick up an unfamiliar block of Cheddar, hoping in vain that this time, this time, it will actually be sharp, as claimed. I don't want no wimpy American-masquerading-as-Cheddar crap. I want Cheddar so sharp it makes me wince.

q) Totally unrelated to recs, I just wanted to mention that Henku's comment elsewhere in a conversation about "dark" gods such as Set and Yinepu to the effect of "there are jobs that have to be done, and someone's gotta do them" made me imagine a very unusual episode of Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe. "No, Mike Rowe, you may not handle the spear. Only I am strong enough to smite the uncreated. You man the oars!" (Set-In-My-Head uses people's full names and sounds like James Earl Jones. Or maybe Michael Dorn as Worf.)