read all the Cormack McCarthy books and went right back to reading Discworld again, front to back. The second time through you notice things you didn’t the first time, and it makes it all that much better.

Odd to think of McCarthy cleansing the palate, but it was a serious change of pace. His dialog makes you work pretty hard at it, but it’s impressively done.

Also read Gaiman’s “Neverwhere”. Only Gaiman could take something as old and stilted as the “man loses everything and has to fight his way back to normalcy” genre and make it interesting enough that I stayed up all night reading it.