Noam Chomsky is probably the best person to read for truly understanding the nature of the world and what's happening around us socially and politically. He's the "most important intellectual alive" in most polls and, if you really want to start understanding exactly why everything is the way it is, you really MUST start with Chomsky. He is truly revolutionary and, as such, shunned by the mainstream despite having revolutionised not just social and political thinking, but also the scientific field of linguistics.
If you think it's ridiculous that the United States uses propaganda more than any other superpower that ever existed, then you haven't read Noam Chomsky.
For fictional reading I think Ernest Hemingway, Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allen Poe, J D Salinger, Charles Bukowski are awesome.
And for scratching at the surface of the meaning of life and everything read Marcel Proust's 7000 page epic
In Search of Lost Time 
I do a lot of reading.
