A Bright Shining Lie is a great book.

Also: And The Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, by Randy Shilts. From Wiki--"a sweeping and extensively researched journalistic account of the early days of the AIDS epidemic in the United States. It details a variety of overlapping story lines including the tepid response to the epidemic by the scientific research establishment, and the later controversy over competing proprietary claims to discovery of the virus, now known as HIV, that causes AIDS made by a research group at the NIH of the United States led by Robert Gallo, and by a research group at the Pasteur Institute of France led by Luc Montagnier."

And Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir, by Paul Monette.

And Karen Armstrong's The Spiral Staircase, a fascinating story about what it was like to be a nun, what happened to her after she left the convent, and how she became the writer and thinker she is today.

For fiction:

The Dave Robicheaux series, by James Lee Burke

Richard Morgan's sci fi trilogy about a time when your "self" can be stored in a cortical stack and moved from body to body. First book of the trilogy is Altered Carbon.

Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch books. Between these and Robicheaux, I seem to be in an iconoclastic, troubled-cop, with sometimes alcohol problems and Vietnam histories, mood. I have no idea why.

Seattle librarian Nancy Pearl has written two wonderful books about HER favorite books. She has a very wide-ranging set of tastes, and I found many of the books I love in there. The first one is called Book Lust, and I think the second may be simply called More Book Lust. You couldn't have a more wonderful compendium of book suggestions. She has them in chapters by type of book, too. Just READING Book Lust itself is fun.