Recommend me...

[METALMAN]

Empire of the Sun - J.G. Ballard.

Set in China during WWII. Prison camps and stuff. great book.

[Skummy]

Anything by Haruki Murakami is fantastic, well worth reading. I'd recommend "Kafka On The Shore" as a good starting point, followed by either "Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" or "Hard-Boiled Wonderland & The End Of The World". They're all fantastic (or the ones I've read are, anyway, with the exception of "Sputnik Sweetheart")...they're kind of fantasy, in a bizarre and very unique way; kind of mixing Western cultural references with really out-there fantasy and vague allusions to Japanese folklore (don't worry, you don't need an encyclopedic knowledge of it or anything), along with a healthy dosage of "perception of reality" type ponderings, with the exception of "Norwegian Wood" which is essentially a straight romance novel, although a bloody marvelous one all the same.

Neil Gaiman's a good bet, too. He gets a bit formulaic in places (as wonderful as they are, there's a lot of parallels between "Neverwhere" and "American Gods", for example), but he's an easy read, but very interesting, with a good sense of humour. He's like a more down-to-Earth Pratchett in many senses, and his short stories are all worth a read too, there's a couple of compilations of them available.

As for Pratchett, he's damn good. Simple as that. I wouldn't read as much as I do without him. A lot of his later stuff is avoidable, because whereas his earlier stuff is drawing relatively subtle or at least imaginative parallels between his Discworld and our own culture, the later stuff is just like "Right, imagine but on Discworld, yeah?", and a lot of it seems pretty flat in comparison. Anything involving the Ankh-Morpork City Watch is fantastic, though.

Outside of the vaguely fantasy genre, I can recommend Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs et al, who all tend to dabble in realism, but written in fairly interesting or unique ways. Same goes for James Joyce, although he can be one hell of a struggle, especially Ulysses; it's a book everyone should read, but it's no easy task.

[Vamp]

Any of the Bond books, ever. Well, the Flemming ones.