I read Karpyshyn's Darth Bane Trilogy a couple months ago. It was a great example of the villain protagonist; not generally doing things FOR TEH EVULS, but acting sensibly from some compelling motive. You might not agree, but you understand. Apparently this guy wrote for a lot of the Bioware games where you get paragon/renegade dialogue options, so I guess it's not hugely surprising that he can write both sides convincingly.
It's been mostly light fare this year. I recently dropped "The Raistlin Chronicles", despite it being pretty good relative to what you would expect from Dragonlance, or genre fiction. I just hit my limit for this sort of wankery.
Some actual literature: The Hermit and the Wild Woman, by Edith Wharton. A short character study of a kid who goes innawoods after his village gets the JRPG hometown treatment, somewhere in Italy several hundred years ago. Wharton's prose is wonderfully free of the phrase "the big man", which is used liberally to describe both Caramon in Dragonlance, and the protagonist in Karpyshyn's novelization of Baldur's Gate II, which I also read for some damned reason.
She makes an interesting, if perhaps tendentious, study of deeply religious people of the middle ages and the different ways their piety can manifest.