Serious reading

[MrRubix]

I've put together a short list (or three) that should help you on your way to your goal of being well-versed in literature, as you wanted. Some are easier reads than others, but honestly, you'll find all you need in the following lists if your goal is to have a pretty decent working knowledge of classical/modern-day literature (the following lists are, of course, just my opinion -- but I chose them for well-roundedness):

Check out some Greek works:
Homer's Illiad and Odyssey
Plato's Republic
Virgil's Aeneid
Euclid's Elements
Sophocles' Oedipus Rex

And then maybe look into the ol' literary canons:
George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm
Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart
John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men
Albert Camus' The Stranger (one of my favorites)
Joseph Heller's Catch-22
Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange
F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby
Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451
William Golding's Lord of the Flies
Jack Kerouac's On The Road
Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five
JD Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye
Aldous Huxley's Brave New World
Lois Lowry's The Giver
Marcel Proust's A la Recherche du Temps Perdu
Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World
Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, and Anthem
Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea
Elie Wiesel's Night
Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country
Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace and Anna Karenina
Hermann Hesse's Siddartha
Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon


Then check out some cooler stuff:
Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, especially the first book, Eye Of The World
Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho
JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings
Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time
William Gibson's Neuromancer
Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, and Cryptonomicon
Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, The God Delusion, and The Greatest Show on Earth
William Shakespeare's Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida, The Tempest, and Much Ado About Nothing
Douglas Adams' Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Stephen King's The Stand
Frank Herbert's Dune
James Clavell's Shogun
Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha
Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel
Yann Martel's Life of Pi
Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner's Freakonomics
JK Rowling's Harry Potter series
Robert Ludlum's Bourne trilogy
David Guterson's Snow Falling on Cedars
David Sedaris' Me Talk Pretty One Day and Naked
Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible
Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner
Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin
Nick Hornby's High Fidelity
Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones
Jeffrey Euginides' Middlesex
Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak
Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife
Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow
Nicholas Taleb's Fooled by Randomness
Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth (I *loved* this as a kid)
Alain de Botton's On Love
Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach
Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo