The Night's Dawn trilogy (The Reality Dysfunction, The Neutronium Alchemist, The Naked God) by Peter F. Hamilton - a interesting blend of solid sci-fi, light history, and a dash of theology in a less ham-fisted way than Arthur C. Clarke.
Revelation Space universe by Alastair Reynolds - Pretty fun hard sci-fi which deals with the whole FTL barrier in a very fun way, mostly. His unrelated novel "Pushing Ice" is also a great book.
The Culture novels by Iain M. Banks - great far-future post-scarcity series of books, some of which are related to the others to varying degrees. Elon Musk likes to name his spaceships after the spaceships in these books but don't let that connection turn you off from these wonderful books (if you aren't a Musk fan, anyways)
Thirding anything by Dan Simmons, loved the Hyperion Cantos when I was a teenager. I did read Ilium and Olympos as well but I didn't like those as much. The Terror was a great tv show, always meant to read the book.
The original Conan novels by Robert E. Howard. They're like 100+ years old and no they are not politically correct at all like a lot of popular white guy fiction at the time but they are amazing reading.
For fiction, anyways.
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