I like James Baldwin, Thomas Hardy, Kate Chopin, Austen, Dickens... lets see who else? Out of contempary stuff I like that guy, forget his name, the author of Atonement. I'll tell you who I'm NOT a fan of-James Joyce, Faulkner, Woolf, Thomas Pynchon
I like reading stuff by Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, Ronald takaki. The Rape of Nanking is a good book.