Metaplanetary by Tony Daniel is pretty good space opera, if you don’t mind an implausible setting. Good writing and strong characters, lots of suspense and action, full of marvels. It’s out of print but it wasn’t hard to find a copy on Amazon.
The Space Opera Renaissance has a lot of short adventure stories which might lead you to writers you like.
If you like humorous space opera, the Vorkosigan series by Lois McMaster Bujold rocks.
I also like the Honor Harrington books, if you like long, space tech space opera. But the later books get verbose.
Mixed recommendation for The War Against the Chtorr series by David Gerrold. I really love this series, but the “hero” is a bit of a whiner, and their are lots of twisted bits going on. Essentially the Earth goes to hell as an alien ecology is invading and Earth life is losing. Primary reason it is a mixed recommendation is that the series is stalled and incomplete. Gerrold had creative differences with the IIRC publisher who has the rights to publish, and he won’t work with them again, so no more books in the series - ever. Sucks because the story is incomplete.
I also enjoyed the Mage World books by Debra Doyle and James D. McDonald (The Price of the Stars, etc). More space opera with some mystical elements thrown in.
John C. Wright’s Golden Age trilogy is a fantastically inventive far-future society. He really thinks through the social implications of advanced technology, including the meaning of liberty in a world without privacy, and the economics of a society managed by powerful AI computers. It’s also a lively and often comic adventure story, although the protagonist is pompous and occasionally long-winded.
I just got done reading John Dies at the End by David Wong. I took the book on vacation with me and was the perfect page turner on the beach. For some reason, it’s being sold for very high prices on Amazon.com because it’s out of print, but I walked right into a Borders store 2 weeks ago and found two copies on the shelf.