Books
Mass Effect: Revelation is a prequel/ramp-up to the video game series, written by the creator of the Mass Effect universe/IP, who also has a couple novels in the Star Wars universe under his belt. Not surprisingly, it wasn't great, with cardboard characters, a straightforward plot and cliched, um,  everything. The amazon reviews, taken as a whole, sum it up quite well. Still, as a fan of the game I enjoyed getting a bit of the backstory. And despite this first entry, the Mass Effect universe has a hell of a lot of narrative potential. It's got a lot of familiar sci-fantasy elements (bipedal aliens, space marines, telekinetics), which are justified by the fiction instead of pulled out of a mystical ass. And you gotta love it when AI research is illegal only to forestall the inevitable galactic conquest.

The Game Players of Titan was simply fantastic. I don't know if I've read any Philip K. Dick before, but I started reading this book and had to keep reading until I finished it. It is delightfully mind-blasting and strange, with just the kind of paranoid freakiness that I enjoy. And precogs. The epilogue was your typical 'slain bad guy opens his eye' kind of dealie (not literally) which only lessened the satisfaction a little. Still, tons of fun.

Ubik, also by Philip K. Dick, was decent but felt much more like a drawn out short story. I admit the setup--a hand-picked cadre of Psionicists going up against an unknown enemy--intrigues me more than where it ended up. Still, it has plenty of, as Wikipedia puts it, "the confusion of real and unreal", which keeps it enjoyably mind-bending. Once again, it had a "twisty" final page that diminished the story a smidge. Remember the Planet of the Apes remake? Yeah.