"well-educated" in what? just all around?
i'd go with Machiavelli, Voltaire, Steinbeck, Dostoevsky (if you can read him. i find him horribly dull), Plato, Socrates, Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain, Kafka, Marx/Engels, Hobbes, Anatole France, Rushdie, Houstn Smith - Religions of Man, W.E.B Dubois, Maya Angelou, Bukowski, Kant (not a fan, but still...), Kerouac, Sartre, Nietzsche, Yates, Shakespeare, etc.....
also, the NY times, BBC news, NPR, etc for news....
lots of poetry and philosophy for the most part. i generally prefer philosophy and science to poetry though
oh, and pretty much any "banned" book you can get your hands on (any book that has been pulled from library shelves in any country at any time).
