July's recommendation: War of the Gods, by Poul Anderson.
I'm always aware, when I recommend a book, that it won't be to everyone's taste. It goes without saying. This time, though, I feel somewhat obligated to say it, because the book I'm recommending reads almost more like an Icelandic saga than a modern novel.
Which is no accident. Poul Anderson wrote this as a novelization of the legend of Hadding Dane-king, as taken from the work of Saxo Grammaticus, a twelfth-century Danish chronicler, and it forms an interesting bridge between the style of that time and the style of ours. Therefore, if you're interested in the literature of northern Europe, but have been put off by the bald narration it tends to use, then you may find this more accessible. It takes on the qualities of that literature, while smoothing over some of the elements that make the sagas hard to read. Anderson even says in his afterword that he deliberately avoided Latinisms in his prose as much as possible (without resorting to Ander-Saxon, a style he invented elsewhere).
So this novel does not read entirely like a novel. There is little of the interiority we expect from modern fiction, little sense of there being complexities and layers and depth to the characters. There is, however, an austere strength to the language, a grittiness and solidity that writers of froofy wispy fantasy might do well to learn from. You can feel the presence of the world, and visualize the hard edges of the lives the characters lead. A king in those times was not like we think of kings today; even his relatively luxurious life was not far removed from dirt and cold, and he rarely if ever got to sit at home and send other people to deal with his problems. That is the great virtue of the Norse kingship model, and the admirable quality of Hadding: he is constantly moving, constantly working, constantly in touch with the farmers and traders who make up his kingdom, making sacrifices of his own to better their lives, because generosity is one of the foremost qualities of a king in that land.
The arc of the story is essentially biographical. We start with Hadding as an infant, his father recently killed, and follow him through his fostering with jotuns (aka giants) -- oh yes, the mythical world is not far removed from the human one. The narrative is framed by a story of the gods, and throughout we encounter thursir, witchcraft, elves of a sort rather harsher than we're used to. While at the same time weaving through the history of the Norse world at that time, endless wars between Danes and Geats and Swedes and Jutes and all the other peoples of that region. And it's all, mythical and mortal worlds alike, well-grounded in what we know of the pagan Norse world.
It's entirely possible I like this novel so much only because I spent a year up to my eyeballs in sagas and Viking histories, working on my senior thesis, but hey. Even if you don't, as I do, find yourself giggling every other page over the inclusion of some familiar little detail, I think you might find it interesting. It certainly makes a refreshing change from much of the fantasy out there today -- most especially the stuff that pretends to draw from the same well.