I responded to a similar request a few weeks ago. I don't really think you'll be able to get an accurate understanding of contemporary Middle East history by reading just one or two books. It's fairly difficult to find a good general overview of the entire Middle East that doesn't just read like a textbook. Fisk's book, like others have already mentioned, is a fairly good starting point, but I think it's a little too short on analysis and the author meanders a great deal, making the book much longer than necessary. Here's the list of books I suggested in the previous thread.

General Overviews

Eugene Rogan, The Arabs: A History

Charles Tripp's The Power and the People: Paths of Resistance in the Middle East and Fawaz Gerges's The New Middle East: Protest and Revolution in the Arab World are both good introductions to more recent Middle East history dealing with the Arab Spring.

Rashid Khalidi, Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East

Iran

Many general histories of the Middle East tend to downplay Iran and focus more on the Arab world. For Iranian history, you should check out these books:

Michael Axworthy, Revolutionary Iran: A History of the Islamic Republic

Nicole Keddie, Modern Iran: Roots and Revolution

Ray Tayekh, Guardians of the Revolution: Iran and the World in the Age of the Ayatollahs

Arab-Israeli Conflict

Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict

Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood

Iraq

Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq

Joseph Sassoon, Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party: Inside an Authoritarian Regime provides an interesting look inside Iraqi politics and society. He uses new Iraqi government documents that were opened after the fall of Hussein's government.

Joost Hiltermann, A Poisonous Affair: America, Iraq, and the Gassing of Halabja

2003 Iraq War

Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor's two-volume series, Cobra II and Endgame is by far the most comprehensive.

For a shorter account of the war from an American perspective, check out Terry Anderson's Bush's Wars.

From an Iraqi standpoint, check out Ali Alawi's The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace and Zaid al-Ali's The Struggle for Iraq's Future: How Corruption, Incompetence, and Sectarianism Have Undermined Democracy

To get a feel for the Iraq War's effects on everyday Iraqis, I would suggest you check out a collection of short stories by Hassan Blasim, titled The Corpse Exhibition: And Other Stories from Iraq, as well as Anthony Shadid's Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War

Islamic Extremism and Terrorism

Fawaz Gerges's The Far Enemy: How Jihad Went Global is one of the most important books on the subject.

I also highly recommend Alex Strick von Linschoten and Felix Kuehn's An Enemy We Created: The Myth of the Taliban-Al Qaeda Merger in Afghanistan

Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 is an absolutely great read on the origins and history of al Qaeda.

Peter Bergen's The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict between America and al Qaeda is the most comprehensive history of al Qaeda and American counter terrorist policy after September 11th. It is a little dated, though, as it was written before the death of bin Laden. Bergen has released what is effectively a sequel with Manhunt: The Ten Year Search for bin Laden from 9/11 to Abottabad.

Another great book is an edited work by Bruce Hoffman and Fernando Reinares, The Evolution of the Global Terrorist Threat: From 9/11 to Osama bin Laden's Death

You might also like Yaroslav Trofimov's The Siege of Mecca: The 1979 Uprising at Islam's Holiest Shrine

U.S. and the Middle East

The best overview is Douglas Little's American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945

Also check out Ussama Makdisi's Faith Misplaced: The Broken Promise of U.S.-Arab Relations, 1820-2001 and Lawrence Freedman's A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East

Steve Coll's Ghost Wars is an absolutely essential read.

For U.S.-Saudi Arabia relations, check out Rachel Bronson's Thicker than Oil: America's Uneasy Partnership with Saudi Arabia

By far the best book I know is The Great War of Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East by Robert Fisk.

Fisk is a journalist based in Beirut who has been covering the Arab world since the late seventies. His book is a colossal and depressing book on everything relating to the Muslim world, from the creation of Middle Eastern borders after world war one, through dozens of wars, three interviews with Osama bin Laden, all the way up to the beginning of the Arab Spring.

In case you don't read the book(it's like 1500 pages) here's the TLDR: shit's fuct, yo.

Like /u/trampabroad, I would like to recommend Fisk's book, too, since it's quite exhaustive and gives interesting perspective of the events that happened. He even talked about meeting Osama, which I think takes massive cojones.

Word of warning though: the book is rather depressing. If the political situation doesn't make you weep, the idea that Iraqi parents are bankrupting themselves to purchase anti-chemo drugs would.

"My Pet Goat"