In regards to Lovecraft... I'm a big fan, have been for a long time, and I utterly love all that early 20th century weird fiction. Lovecraft, Blackwood, Derleth, C.A. Smith, R.E. Howard... Just fantastic. Once upon a time I ran a discussion list dedicated to that sort of thing. I disagree with PJ's assessment that the stories are badly written and only worth reading so you can catch the pop culture references. Lovecraft's prose is certainly a rich purple, but he does successfully convey the horror, mystery and overwhelming madness required for the tales. And the pop culture references we see now are so far removed from Lovecraft's intentions of his stories as to be utterly disconnected and meaningless.
Also, while Lovecraft is most known for his Cthulhu mythos, his other stories (and the bulk of his canon) are, I think, much better. And a lot of that mythos was actually realised by Lovecraft's friend and author August Derleth. Dertleth took it all after Lovecraft's death and put it into an organised codex of sorts and wrote a number of pastiches based on that content. Lovecraft himself never saw it all like that, it wasn't mean to be ordered and such.
Gaiman's A Study In Emerald isn't very good, surprisingly. He basically took Doyle's A Study In Scarlet and revamped it, with pretty poor results. Gaiman is largely much, much better than what he wrote in that story, but then I'm also a big fan of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. I suppose with that story my expectations were just too high, the combination of three of my favourite authors just couldn't fulfill what I imagined
Gig - how are the Dresden books? I really liked the short-lived TV series.
Currently I'm reading The Long Dark Teatime Of The Soul, the second Dirk Gently book by Douglas Adams. I read both books when they came out (the first in 1987 - I bought my copy of the first book at a reading Adams did in Toronto and I got it signed) and I thought 20 years later is probably a good time to re-read them both.
Brilliant stuff, and better than Hitchhiker's.
Also reading The Enemy Of The World, a novelisation of the Doctor Who serial of the same name (2nd Doctor). Last summer I went into the local used book shop and they had stacks of the old novels (first through to fifth Doctor) so I bought them all. The funny thing is, I went in to sell books becasue we were moving into the house we had just bought and were trying to reduce the collection a bit. Didn't quite work out.