June's recommendation: The Fall of the Kings, by Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman.
This book makes my little academic heart go squee. One of the two main characters is a dissolute young nobleman -- relatively standard fare for a fantasy novel. The other, however, is a young Doctor of Ancient History at a respected University. And that detail isn't just for color; this isn't the sort of book that's about a sheltered academic who finds himself swept up in grand adventures that involve swords and monsters. This is the sort of book that's about an academic who comes up with some crackpot theories and gets into arguments with his colleagues and goes rooting through dusty old archives for evidence and sways impressionable students over to his side and man I wish grad school were more like this. It's university in the style of past centuries, where rival student factions get into street brawls over differences in methodology, and passionately swear their lives and last pennies to the pursuit of unsullied Truth. For crying out loud, part of the climax of the novel is a public academic debate.
And it's wonderfully fantastical. There's a suggestion that magic used to operate on a level that could be consciously understood and controlled, but since none of the people now messing with it have the faintest idea what they're doing, it's a magic of irrationality and instinct, passion, impulse, intuition. But that wildness is straining against -- though not, I would say, in conflict with -- the rationality, logic, and empiricism of the academic approach, which makes for an interesting tension.
The novel has odd little quirks as well. Like the fact that it's damned hard to find any important characters who are actually in ongoing heterosexual relationships -- they're all homosexual, indiscriminate (I wouldn't say bi), or else widowed. <g> And the odd names that pop up from time to time, making me wonder if Kushner and Sherman aren't making nods to fantasy they respect; I could write off one or maybe even two as coincidence, but it's hard to dismiss Bracegirdle (Tolkien), Mezentius (Eddison), and the Marquis of Carabas (Gaiman, though I believe he got it from somewhere else), especially when I know there's a couple more I forgot. And no doubt several I missed. [Later edit: the Marquis of Carabas is, among other things, the name Puss in Boots gives to his master.]
It's got a vivid setting, with a complex history that they manage to get across without being boring (helps that it's integral to the plot). It's actually a sequel, in the loose sense, to Kushner's novel Swordspoint, which I have not read; they take place sixty years apart, so I guess it would be more accurate to simply say they take place in the same world. It's got interesting characters -- quite a few of them, and I think it's an achievement of the authors that they stay distinct in my mind, when St. Cloud alone has five students in his inner circle and Theron has relatives coming out his ears, few of whom are related to him in any simple way. And it has a plot which hinges heavily on academic research. <g> Is it any wonder I like it?
Many thanks to Thomas Seay, who gave me my copy of the book at ICFA two years ago.