I recently finished China
Mieville‘s second novel, Perdido Street Station
(on a generous recommendation from CGB). 
Difficult as it was to put it down, I read it in several delightful
interludes over many weeks, just chipping away at it between the reading I was
doing for coursework. And I’ve never identified as a genre-fan of science
fiction or fantasy, but all of that’s changed now (it’s in crisis).

In and around the complex sci-fi/fantasy cityscape of New Crobuzon, Isaac Dan
der Gimnebulin, a self-described "dilettante" scientist working on a crisis
engine, dodges close-call after close-call after he accepts a project
commissioned by a nomadic Garuda (bird-person) named Yagharek.  Yag
lost his wings as recompense for a crime we only learn about at the end of the
novel; he walks many miles to the city where he recruits Isaac’s assistance in
restoring him to flight.  Isaac accepts the difficult assignment.  He
immerses himself in research on flight, and in doing so, circulates a call
for winged things to observe (develop a heliotype, model, etc.).  Several
roguish figures want in on the money.  They bombard his lab with winged
specimens.

And this is just the start.  Perdido Street Station is
unrelenting with its startlingly fast pace, vividly developed figures and
terrain, and wild, shocking twists.  I don’t want to give too much of it
away; I suspect that if you read this entry and you haven’t yet read Perdido
Street Station, you’ll be tempted to run out and pick it up. 
Mieville’s fiction, here overflowing with eccentricity and imagination, is so irresistibly, punishingly smart, the pages threaten to drink your mind like the antagonist
slake-moths.  A taste:

     The construct jerked.
     Deep in the construct’s intelligence engine circulated
the peculiar solipsistic loop of data that constituted the virus, born where a
minute flywheel had skittered momentarily.  As the steam coursed through
the brainpan with increasing speed and power, the virus’s useless set of
queries went round and round in an autistic circuit, opening and shutting the
same valves, switching the same switches in the same order.
     But this time the virus was nurtured.  Fed. (210)

There’s so much more here that I’m afraid I can’t really do it justice: Weaver, a plane-traveling spider-figure who wields razor-honed scissors; an army
of remades who follow the orders of their pieced-together crime boss, Motley; a
vodyani watercrafter, Lin, who dates Isaac; a Construct Council self-foraged
from a heap of rubbish; and a bad-ass team of slake-moths who play havoc on the
psychosphere of New Crobuzon. Oy.  I heartily recommend it.