I think you must mean
Gentlemen of the Road, aka "Jews with Swords." I thought it was interesting, but not brilliant. If I recall correctly, it is as realistic as possible, with no magic or fantastic elements.
No fantastic elements at all? Ah well probably not a good choice then.
I did read China Mieville's
Perdido Street Station, which was pretty good and quite D&D in feel, especially when the crew of adventurer monster hunters shows up.
It seems to me that there are different purposes for a new Appendix N:
(a) educate about the origins of some classic D&D elements
(b) provide inspiration for characters and campaigns
and then (c) that I didn't think of before but several people have mentioned: make sure it has some very well-known modern stuff so you don't intimidate people with a list of stuff they've never heard of. OK.
There's so much you could put in there though...how to narrow it down?
The Song of Ice and Fire I actually think is a classic example of what NOT to put in there (unless you really need to for (C)). I've only read the first book (I think I'll just switch to the TV show now)...but as I understand the gist of it is a complexly plotted, continent-spanning epic with lots of behind the scenes machinations and political maneuvering, and heavy scene-framing and POV-jumping.
D&D CAN do this of course, but not easily. Especially not if you're a noob DM.
What a noob DM can do with D&D "out of the box" is a semi-episodic structure where the story follows around a band of wandering adventurers as they travel somewhere, poke around seeing what's up, get into trouble, see some crazy s***, resolve the trouble (gaining some potentially useful friends, or getting run out of town) and then off they go somewhere else. Maybe with a simplistic "main quest" backbone plotline. Or no backbone plot at all.
The original appendix N is great not just because it educates about the origin of D&D elements, but because it's very pulpy with a lot of short story series about wandering anti-heroes, which exemplifies this style. In fact judging by the number of posts I've read online that go something like "Help I'm a new DM. The players don't care about my plot and just tramp around killing people and stealing things!" I would say that the game just pulls in this direction regardless of what you have in mind starting out.
