Just finished reading a couple books by Kate Griffin (Her Webpage) about magic in modern urban settings. Thought they had some good descriptive imagery that would translate well to Shadowrun.

What books have you read recently that you'd recommend as Shadowrun background material?

Please don't let this be the beginning of another "Shadowrun Movies" thread

The Forge of Mars and Digital Dead. Great books. They are the first and second book of their series, but you can basically read one without the other as the stories are highly contained. I suggest Digital Dead over The Forge of Mars if you can only read one though.

Myself?

Hellboy. Constantine (yes, the movie) and the comics.

And for your physads, Tenjou Tenge. Hands down the best representation of what your average physad can do, up to and including stopping cars with your fists, leaving craters in walls with your fists, twelve year old sword adepts, mystic adepts and one *hell* of a weapon focus...The only problem is that the translated version edited out a lot of stuff for the sake of aiming for a younger age group (look: I'll get this out there: it was written / drawn by a hentai artist. Amazing looking, but it ain't going to work for your average fifteen year old - or would it?).

Any books in the "urban fantasy" genre - Kim Harrison, Kelly Armstrong, Laurel K. Hamilton's Anita Blake series (for the first six or seven books, before they turned into badly-written furry BDSM porn), etc.

The Dresden Files, definitely. Well, the first couple anyways. After a while they start getting a little silly (Harry, the main character, gains access to literal Hellfire to supercharge his spells, and after losing that is given the non-evil equivalent).

It's not really magic related, but I'll also add Moxyland to the list just for a really good cyberpunk feel.

Snow Crash(of course) and Jeff Somers' Avery Cates novels(The electric church, digital plague, eternal prison and a new one coming out later this summer)

Definitely Kim Harrison...

The whole series based upon Rachael Morgan is outstanding reading...

Keep the Faith

i like to read up on a lot of mythology based books since the magic side of things is what really interests me the most in shadowrun. the pendragon cycle is really good in that regard. the author did an amazing job of brings several different myths together in a new and interesting way which is exactly what shadowrun has done. its given me a lot of great ideas over the last few months of playing.