First, stories to read with your kids:

Watership Down, by Richard Adams. Your kids may love it.

A.E. Milne's "Winnie Ille Pu." Ditto.

A Series of Unfortunate Events, Lemony Snicket. The greatest children's books ever written.

For you:

Tales of the White Hart, by Arthur C. Clarke. Harry Purvis is the biggest sci-fi tale-tale bullshitter this side of the Mississippi.

Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches, by Marvin Harris. His other books are a bit nutty, but in this he a) offers really cool explanations for cultural phenonomena, and b) blasts hippies.

Innocents Abroad and Roughing It, by Mark Twain.

Papa, by Susie Clemens. The best biography of Mark Twain ever written, by one of the sweetest little girls who ever lived: his daughter.

The Adventures of Mottel, the Cantor's Son, by Sholom Aleichem. A Yiddish Tom Sawyer.

Thomas Sowell's Culture Trilogy. It's history, but anyone who'd refuse to read Sowell needs to be sent to the Gulag.

Scifi: Peter F. Hamilton, "Pandora's Star" (I recommend most of his books, but you have to start somewhere.)

Thrillers: Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, "Riptide" or "Thunderhead."

"The Silver Pigs" by Lindsey Davis - First book in the Marcus Didius Falco series- hard-boiled detective fiction set in ancient Rome.

Some characters for children are particularly vile

So that's why they're always wearing sunglasses.

Start with "The Eyre Affair" by Jasper FForde and you will be hooked on the Thursday Next detective series. JF is the heir (Eyre?) apparent of the mighty Douglas Adams. Laugh out loud funny. Imagine Miss Havesham with an addiction to muscle cars, and you are on the right track...

Oh yeah, and did I mention there was time travel? :)

I'm not a genre fan, but I love the old judge, PD James, especially Devices & Desires and Death on Holy Orders. You can add her to your list for non-fiction for her journal, which I enjoyed, Time To Be in Earnest. [you can probably borrow Holy Orders from Rob, anglophile that he is]

Modern stuff I have recently enjoyed - fiction: Gob's Grief by Chris Adrian, Oryx & Crake by Atwood, Life of Pi by Yann Martel, The Winter Queen, Leviathan and newly out The Turkish Gambit by Boris Akunin (which also fills the detective genre bill); nonfiction: Reading Lolita in Teheran, The Dangerous Summer by Hemingway and old favorite Songlines or In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin.

C.S. Friedman's "Coldfire Trilogy", the first of which is Black Sun Rising. I'm also a fan of the Sano Ichiro mysteries. I'm only through the first half dozen or so, but so far so good. Those are written by Laura Joh Rowland

Anything by Neal Stephenson. You'd like his stuff. His sense of humor is almost as whacked out as yours. I'd start with "Cryptonomicon"---which is one whopping fat paperback---and then, if you're so inclined, move on to the Baroque Cycle, which is made up of three 1000+ page books. Starts with "Quicksilver," moves on to "The Confusion," and ends with "The System of the World."

Richard Hoyt's "John Denson" mysteries. If you never get a chance to visit the Northwest, you'll get great flavour with either "Siskiyou" or "Whoo?"

Read, enjoy.

No clue how this is going to turn out? Donald E. Westlake's "Brothers Keepers". Ecumenical enough to confuse the laity.

Read, enjoy...share.

C.W.Ceram: Gods, Graves and Scholars. Schliemann, Champollion, Petrie, Carter, et al.

Arthur Koestler: The Case of the Midwife Toad. OOP, but available through Amazon (Used and new)

Peter Matthiessen: Under The Mountain Wall. A very different view of the "Noble Savage"

George Adamson: My Pride and Joy. OOP, but available through Amazon.

Jenny Uglow: The Lunar Men. Boulton, E. Darwin, Priestley, Wedgewood and friends.

A.C. Doyle: "The Case of the LLama That Yipped in the Night".

Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child - anything but especially Cabinet of Curiosities and Murder of Crows.

I'd recommend Terry Pratchett as an author you might enjoy. As you're in a university setting, you might especially enjoy the novels involving the wizards and the Unseen University. Start off with 'The Last Continent', since it involves time travel. The genre is comedic fantasy, but I recommend it highly anyway.

Vince Flynn - all of his novels are fun reads - political thrillers.

Dennis Lehane - I loved Mystic River and Shutter Island. He's a gritty but lyrical writer, if that makes sense.

James BeauSeigneur's Christ Clone Trilogy - eschatological fiction with enough science and politics and reality to go with the Biblical prophecy to be very interesting reads. These books are no Left Behind.

For time travel and humor, it's hard to beat "To Say Nothing of the Dog" by Connie Willis. You will laugh. It won several awards in the 90's. Some of her other books are quite good as well.

"Ilium" by Dan Simmons combines modern Sci-Fi with the Trojan War and life on Mars. It sounds strange but it works. The second book of the series comes out soon.

"American Gods" by Neil Gaiman defies simple explaination but is fantastic.

The titles in Stephen Hunter's Bob Lee Swagger series (he is a former marine sniper put in some violent situations) can be uneven but most were great and each stands alone. Start with "Dirty White Boys" even though it is an offshoot of the series. Lots of action, great story.

I second the nominations for the Vince Flynn ouvre and for The Eyre Affair.

I'll second Neil Gaimon's "American Gods," although his "Neverwhere" and "Stardust" are also good and maybe lighter reading. I like C.S. Friedman's "Coldfire Trilogy", although I like the first book in the series better than the rest [and it stands alone pretty well].

I would recommend "Expendable" by James Alan Gardner, as well as the rest of the books in the series: "Vigilant", "Hunted", "Ascending", "Trapped". "Radient" is out in hardback but I havn't read it yet.

On the genre front, try Gene Wolfe's recent pair of fantasy books, "The Knight" and "The Wizard". He takes the standard trappings of the Big Commercial Fantasy but does something more interesting with it in the end. Also good is his collection of short stories, "Innocents Aboard". Also on the science fiction/fantasy category is Neil Gaiman's "Coraline", a book for children that has been enjoyed by every adult to whom I gave it.

If it can squeak by as "not-quite-a-heavy-novel", try Marilynne Robinson's "Gilead". It's short, though very intense. She's an amazing writer. Her book of essays, "The Death of Adam", is also very good.

"Political Numeracy", by Michael Meyerson, is about the mathematical issues raised by the American constitution. Forget the "chaotic constitution" nonsense on the cover; the issues are actually pretty interesting. Something similar but on a more technical level is Don Saari's "Chaotic Elections". I can recommend a good history of math book if that interests you...

Finally, read a book by the new pope. I particularly like his two book-length interviews, "Salt of the Earth" and "God and the World". Both were done with Peter Seewald, a German journalist who, I hear, returned to the Church, partly as a result of his interaction with Ratzinger.

Fernando,
I agree with the Gene Wolfe nomination. Also, his "Book of the New Sun", "Book of the Long Sun" and "Whorl" trilogies, along with his short story collections are all excellent.