Have you already read Laurie Marks's element books? Fire Logic etc? Very nice new ideas about families and cooking, both. You must have read Chandler's The Big Sleep. Everyone was talking about Ysabeau Wilce's Flora Segunda but if you haven't gotten to it, do. Against all odds I find Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 to be very funny. Nicola Griffith's Always is a funny love song to Scandinavian Seattle, two words I didn't know went together.

Argh, I read so much YA recently but can't remember what it was.