I haven't read since my daughter was born a few years ago, and I've started getting more free time where reading would fit nicely. I'm tired of surfing my same 3 friends for book recommendations, so I'm opening the floor.
My favorite book is Catch-22, and I like a lot of the classics that you typically read in school. I tend to like science fiction and regular-ol' fiction, and tend to dislike fantasy and horror. For nonfiction, I like the Freakonomics-style books (i.e. an expert brain dumping on an interesting topic) better than biography-style books. I've liked a few graphic novels that I've read (Watchmen and I Kill Giants) but I haven't explored the genre that deeply.
For more recent writers/books, I've liked Margaret Atwood (except for the third Oryx and Crake book), Andy Weir, Gillian Flynn, and books I've read/liked in the past 5 years includes The Anomaly/L'Anomalie and Permutation City.
For books I've remember intensely disliking, I didn't like A Little Life, anything I've read by Faulkner, The Girl on the Train, World War Z.
by rabidgnat