I finished Dies the Fire (excellent book and I must read the others; you can at least read the first one without thinking you're missing anything). Now I'm back to reading The Judas Contract, the second book of the Commonwealth duology.
The Commonwealth is fascinating. People have basically conquered death; instead of putting money into social security, they put money into an account that eventually pays for their memory store being transferred to a quick-grown clone body (basically, you come out at about 16 or so). There are a handfull of 400-year-old people around. They don't like dying, but knowing you'll be back takes the sting out of the process. You get some spectacular suicides in a few places because, well, they're just giving up the body early. 18 months later, they'll be awake and around again.
Transit is also very cool. Trains are the big thing again. Space travel is almost a niche science to them; they have wormhole technology that enables transport among all the planets. Zero-width wormholes transmit power and data from remote stations.