Right now I'm reading Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall.
Some of my favorite texts to teach are Judith Butler's Gender Trouble (students who give presentations on it in my theory classes almost always do so in drag!), Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Kate Chopin's The Awakening, Henry James' Daisy Miller.
I have had the most fun researching a novel called The Administratrix, by Emma Ghent Curtis, published in 1889. It is probably the first ever novel about cowboys.
If I wasn't an English professor, I would either be a cosmologist, or a dog-trainer to the stars.