Read The Following:

From Beirut to Jerusalem by Thomas L. Friedman.
It won the National Book Award in 1989 and will provide you with a most helpful, global understanding of the conflict in the Middle East. Such knowledge will be essential to your overall understanding of recent and ongoing history.

And Do NOT Read The Following:

The Complete Prophesies of Nostradamus.
That's just silly. Many of the emails that have been going around claiming that Nostradamus predicted this obscenity are false and those propagating such lies should be very ashamed of themselves.