Fiction:
Inherent Vice --- Thomas Pynchon
The Great and Secret Show --- Clive Barker
Jurassic Park --- Michael Crichton
The Mothman Prophecies --- John A. Keel (1)
The Wind in the Willows --- Kenneth Grahame
Ender's Game --- Orson Scott Card
All Quiet on the Western Front --- Erich Maria Remarque
The Drought --- J. G. Ballard
The Dead Father's Club --- Matt Harris
Children of Men --- P. D. James
The Islanders --- Pascal Garnier
Silence of the Lambs --- Thomas Harris
Inherit the Wind --- Jerome Lawrence & Robert E. Lee
The Butt --- Will Self
Inside Outside --- Philip Jose Farmer
The Panda Theory --- Pascal Garnier
Fanshaw --- Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Scarlet Letter --- Nathaniel Hawthorne
This Census-Taker --- China Mieville
The House of the Seven Gables --- Nathaniel Hawthorne
The A26 --- Pascal Garnier
The Blithedale Romance --- Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Weird --- Edited by Jeff VanderMeer & Ann VanderMeer (2)
Front Seat Passenger --- Pascal Garnier
Non-Fiction:
The Wealth of Networks --- Yochai Benkler
Field Notes from A Catastrophe --- Elizabeth Kolbert
What Ever Happened to Modernism? --- Gabriel Josipovici
Escape Velocity --- Mark Dery
What We See When We Read --- Peter Mendelsund
(1) Author described as non-fiction, publisher hedged bets and labelled in as such, supposedly.
(2) If only this book could be picked by Subterranean or Centipede press so it'd be a better printed and bound book than Tor ever seems to want to do.
I always recommend Ballard, even when not wanted. Relevant quote:
A story by J. G. Ballard, as you know, calls for people who don't
think. One begins with characters who regard the physical universe
as a mysterious and arbitrary place, and who would not dream of
trying to understand its actual laws. Furthermore, in order to be
the protagonist of a J.G. Ballard novel, or anything more than a
very minor character therein, you must have cut yourself off from
the entire body of scientific education. In this way, when the world
disaster — be it wind or water — comes upon you, you are under
absolutely no obligation to do anything about it but sit and worship
it. Even more further, some force has acted to remove from the face
of the world all people who might impose good sense or rational
behavior on you, so that the disaster proceeds unchecked and unopposed
except by the almost inevitable thumb-rule engineer type who for
his individual comfort builds a huge pyramid (without huge footings)
to resist high winds, or trains a herd of alligators and renegade
divers to help him out in dealing with deep water. Algis Budrys,
Galaxy magazine (December 1966)
I'd recommend Pascal Garnier for anyone who likes sickly dark humor + surrealism + noir + a kind of Ballardian-air. Also Pynchon. Hawthorne might be the stand-out this year, in the sense of his works' subtle, implicit ability to question the authorial mode, the nature of the text itself, and the instability of it.
In non-fiction I'd recommend Dery's Escape Velocity; It's from the 90s but still deals too presciently with many of the issues around the near-religification of modern electronic technology. And Josipovici if you lean toward depressive jolts of existential anxiety (it deals mostly with the arts, but I think there's a broader life applicability).