I'm clearing the decks for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (is that really the title?) . . . The most recent books I've read don't really have anything to do with magic or puns, but have a lot in common with each other.
The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead. This article convinced me to read this book, about a disastrously ill-suited couple who use their six children to torment each other, a long time ago, but then it took me a long time to get to it. Then it took me forever to finish it, because it's so appalling that I could only read it in small doses. The father feeds one of the children partially digested food out of his own mouth; I take a break. The eldest daughter helps a neighbor drown her cat; I take a break. Repeat. It's really good, though, and once I gave myself over to the horror of it, I couldn't put it down. Stead really created an entire world in this book: the reading experience is claustrophobic, like Stead's attention to the Pollit family is too close; looking back, though, it's surprising how broad Stead's scope is -- you get not just the family but their entire milieu -- neighbors, schools, grandparents, co-workers, etc.
The Woodlanders, Thomas Hardy. Another entry in the "Are you sure marriage is for you?" genre. This is maybe not one of Hardy's best-known novels, but it's among his most interesting. In general, I think Hardy's characterizations of women and his views on both gender relations and sex are surprisingly modern for a Victorian. This book is probably one of his most modern in that regard. Interesting narrative structure: whereas in others of Hardy's novels (thinking especially of The Mayor of Casterbridge and Far from the Madding Crowd, but I think Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure are like this, too) the plot is pretty heavy and complicated throughout, in The Woodlanders, almost nothing seems to happen (not to say it's boring, just more naturalistic) until about the final 50 pages, at which point it becomes almost unbearably suspenseful.
Blue Heaven, Joe Keenan. More of the same theme, only completely different mood: a gay man and a straight woman decide to marry in order to cash in on the wedding presents. Then things get really complicated. Keenan was a staff writer and producer on Frasier, which makes a lot of sense -- very much the same sensibility and pacing. Only intermittently is it laugh-out-loud funny, but overall it's breezy and enjoyable. Very good update -- was going to say "modernization" but that's not right -- of P.G. Wodehouse. See also Wake Up, Sir! by Jonathan Ames.
Fun Home, Alison Bechdel. At this point, just from the books I've read in the last month or so, I have pretty close to the full reading list for an English class on the topic Unhappy Marriages in English and American Literature, which is strange because I'm not doing this on purpose: mostly I'm reading either things I picked up in London or what I spot on the New Arrivals shelf at my public library. Fun Home is Bechdel's graphic (in several senses) memoir of her childhood in rural Pennsylvania with her emotionally distant parents, particularly her father, an English teacher/funeral home director who may or may not have committed suicide when the author was 20. This book is just about the best thing I've read in a long, long while. It amazed me so much I don't even think I can evaluate anymore whether or not it's objectively good. I think it's possible Bechdel tells more than she shows, but I'm so overwhelmed by the reading experience that I'm afraid I may be making that part up. 
