Hm, some cool dude said he's bored because I'm not writing.
Gotta fix that.
I've read all sorts of books, I'll briefly outline my impressions.
Snatched ideas on what to read from 'ere, for I am an unintellectual pleb.
Neil Gaiman, American Gods.
The book's fun, the author has a way with words, it doesn't press on the brain too much. The mythology of many nations is elegantly and gently woven into the book, you could call it "beautiful postmodernism". It's readable.
Vernor Vinge, Fast Times at Fairmont High
Uncle Vernor, as a futurist and a sci-fi scientist with imagination, is irreplaceable and a genius, let's be real. You can always read all of his books. I actually read the "False Alarm" collection, and the whole thing is recommended reading. The reading isn't exactly easy due to the complexity of the invented worlds, which are not simple to describe with words, let alone translated ones, and you gotta understand physics at least a little bit.
Mike Resnick, Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge
Nothing special, cardboard and kinda boring, but readable. About super-alien-to-us extraterrestrials discussing humanity. Books like this always look unconvincing. Try as you might, the aliens come out fake and similar to humans. Lem in Solaris didn't do it like that, but then again, that's Lem.
Gordon Dickson, The Lost
Here you probably have to read the series from the beginning, but I don't want to. It's essentially not sci-fi, but prose pretending to be serious. Didn't do it for me, because there are no fresh ideas, and reading "about life" is boring to me. Better to go live in real life.
Barry Longyear, Enemy Mine
. . . and its sequels
Overall - the aliens are once again way too similar to humans, clearly because the book isn't new. There are also a lot of implausible premises, specifically ones contradicting the theory of evolution, as I understand it. But the intrigue is there, the characters are alive and emotional, it's an interesting read.
Frederik Pohl, Gateway
A book of the sort that looks rather boring on the surface, but after reading you realize that everything is built cleverly and you develop a certain respect for it. Whether it's worth reading or not - hard to say, more likely yes.
Summing up, you could say that modern sci-fi writers have surpassed their predecessors in complexity by an order of magnitude. Apparently, progress, at least on some plane, does exist, otherwise old books would be perceived on par with new ones. But that's not how it goes. Vernor Vinge paints a gigantic world of the future believably and in detail. His aliens as civilizations have thousands of years of development and history behind them, and behave accordingly. Meanwhile, the aliens in old books don't bother with such a trifle as the integrity of the concept and image, because back then they could get away with it anyway. Kinda like in old movies - now you can see these are people in masks, but back then folks wanted the miraculous and eagerly watched whatever they were given.
This shouldn't be taken as a knock on old books. They have quite a few of their own good sides - say, the humanism and normality of what's happening. This is very clearly seen in Simak's books. Even in Joe Haldeman's book "The Forever War", for all the nightmarishness and pointlessness of the war, what happens is understandable and relatable to a twentieth-century person. Try saying the same about "A Fire Upon the Deep" or "Hyperion", in which the scale and intensity of what's happening forces the reader to fall into a trance.
Why this happens is clear. It's not for me to tell you about globalization, the modern person's uncertainty about reality and tomorrow, as well as the complication of all things and life in general.