Steinbeck is my favorite, James Joyce, Hemingway, so many others. I read about 200 pages a day, it sounds like a lot but really its only about 4 hours of my time. I have a theory that if you read a 1000 novels in your lifetime you will have a greater sense of the world and the people in it. Plus you can actually feel yourself getting smarter when you read a lot, and I think that the world lacks in cultured, well-read people these days.
I love great English classics like Thackeray, Jane Austen, Bronte sisters, philosophy like Richard Bach, Herman Hesse and some professional reading of course.