The Years of Rice And Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson
Ten books set in different eras make up this history of an alternate world in which the Black Death killed off virtually everyone in Europe in the fourteenth century, instead of the third that died in our reality.
While it's an amazing journey, it's best taken book by book, then digested a bit before moving on. I had never read anything by Robinson before, so I wasn't sure what I was getting into. I never expected this. While it's got elements of science fiction/fantasy, it's really a long exploration of religion and sociology set in the framework of a what-if story. It's a good read, and worth taking a look at. 
Lion's Blood by Steven Barnes
Like the Robinson book, this book focuses on a world in which Europe is not a power, and in fact is decimated by disease (though that isn't the only reason for the reversal in this story). The book follows the life of Aidan O'Dere, taken as a slave from his Ireland home and sold into slavery in the New World, Bilalistan.
I first heard about this book from Heather Alexander, who wrote some music to go along with the tale (which you can hear samples of on her page, or buy in CD form). I wanted to read the book from that day, but it wasn't until recently that a copy fell into my hands. Now that I've finished it, I've got to get my hands on the sequel, Zulu Heart. This is a good book that will make you think twice about the history of slavery, something we all should do anyway. Keeping in mind the real history of the world while reading this brought home a lot of aspects of history I'd never thought about before. Another one worth reading.
"He learned, among other things, that teaching was the most rigorous form of learning. He learned to learn more from his students than they did from him; like so many other things, it was the reverse of what it seemed to be, and colleges existed to bring together groups of young people to teach some chosen few of their elders the things that they knew about life, that the old teachers had been in danger of forgetting." -from The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson
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