The Decameron
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is an absolutely perfect book. It’s funny, tragic, poignant and impossible to put down.
The movie is also great, but read the book first. 
Country Squire, you might not do better and could easily do far worse. I strongly urge you to get a volume of Maugham’s short stories (including “Rain”). You will be addicted instantly. His deft and compact style makes for easy and immensely satisfying reading.
Now, would someone please tell me where my post went?!?
It is no longer present in my view of this thread. If someone out there still has a complete version in their browser cache, would you be so kind as to quote it here in full? I’ll happily repay you with a recipe request. This has been happening to my posts with alarming frequency of late.
Read “Three Comrades” by Remarque
and
“One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Marquez
This stuff is interesting, despite being “classic world literature”!
One of my relatives thought Moll Flanders (Daniel Defoe) was very readable by contemporary standards. Maybe not the greatest classic out there though. (I liked it too but I have a high tolerance for 18th century lit)
Nobody mentioned “Huck Finn”? Shocking. Outrageous. Hemingway once famously said that all American literature begins with “Huck Finn” and it is quite true.
Because these haven’t been mentioned either:
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” is one of the most beautifully written books of the last century.
For Hemingway, start with the early short stories rather than the novels. He packs more power into short pieces.
“Invisible Man,” by Ralph Ellison.
Anything by Jorge Luis Borges. “Labyrinths” is perhaps most famous.
Kafka’s “The Trial”.
Do you want recommendations of more recent (last half century) fiction as well?
I’ll recommend the two books that changed my life and how I view literature.
East of Eden by Steinbeck and The Metamorphisis by Kafka.
Lolita.
King Lear or The Tempest.
After reading that you have never read any. My first thought was one of the Mark Twain books. Very easy to read and thoroughly enjoyable. Everyone should have to read “Tom Sawyer” and “Huck Finn”.
Just remember the setting and time of the books so as not to get hung up on some of the “now” completely politically incorrect terminology.
Huckleberry Finn, for an American classic about unresolved problems.
Brave New World, Sci-Fi acceptable to the literary crowd
The Gods Themselves - Isaac Asimov
A Fall of Moondust - Arthur C. Clarke
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress - Robert Heinlein
Three by the big three all involving the moon, since we have been there. The literary crowd doesn’t take sci-fi seriously, but look at how we are communicating NOW. The space race gave us microelectronics.
Dal Timgar
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
I want to recommend another “classic” that everyone has read. It is not “great” literature but it is a joy to read. Rebecca by Daphne DeMaurier. (Someone want to correct that spelling for me?) I wish I could read it again for the first time!
I also back others on Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. They were written by sisters.
In addition to the many fine recommendations already made, I’d like to suggest reading some E. M. Forster, particularly Howard’s End and A Room with a View. They’ve both been made into very good movies, but the books are much, much better. One is sad and wistful, and the other is light and witty, but they’re both really entertaining.
If I may also offer a couple of longer works, try W. M. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers. Both books are extremely funny and very hard to put down once you’ve started.
Seeing as Zeldar mentioned a book that may not be classified as “great literature” I will do the same. I consider Shogun by James Clavell to be an excellent read. I guess any book is great if you find it hard to put down and makes you think after you’ve finished it.
My malfunctioning Way Back Machine would allow me to retrieve only the tiniest snippet of your outstanding post:
“Demonstrating a control of the pen second only to the Bard himself, Maugham’s ability to concisely script stories of human experience is simply breathtaking. Using lines pruned of every single stray word, he brings to life characters and situations that limn the very nature of human existence.”
(I saved this snippet because it was so darned good. Seems like you’re the victim of someone with administrative powers. Sorry)
Now, how about a recipe for a sensational beef stroganoff?
Me too, Zoe.
[slight hijack] But since we can only reread it, I’d like to recommend Rebecca’s Tale by Sally Beauman. She was approved by the DuMaurier estate to write a companion book after she wrote an article in the New Yorker about how wretched the sequel “Mrs. DeWinter” was.
I was very dubious - bought it, spent a few weeks poking it with a stick, and finally read it. It was wonderful revisionist fun. [/slight hijack]
I’d like to second “The Three Musketeers” by Alexandre Dumas. It’s witty, intelligent, and entertaining, which a lot of classic literature cannot claim.
For more modern stuff, I can’t believe no one has yet mentioned “Catch-22” by Joseph Heller. It has everything you could ask for in a novel: comedy, tragedy, drama, horror, you name it. It’s one of my top three books of all time – my copy is falling apart from multiple readings.
As for Shakespeare, my recommendation to you, as a lover of his work and an English major, is to not read his plays but to see them. To me, reading Shakespeare is like trying to enjoy “Raiders of The Lost Ark” by looking at the script. I’d check out Branaugh’s “Hamlet,” and Olivier’s “Richard III” and “Henry V.”
I’m also going to second Homer’s “Odyssey” (long but worth it) and Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” (she uses the word “wretched” on almost every page, but this is the first real science fiction novel ever written – a must for anyone who appreciates the genre). Dante’s “Inferno” and Milton’s “Paradise Lost” are also longish and tough reads, but really are important foundations for much of the western literature that followed them.
I’ll second To Kill a Mockingbird, and not just because my review of same has made me the most money on Epinions. 
I love Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, but I think they would be books you have to work your way into. It would be very easy to be turned off by their diction and not be able to read further. Same with the Brontes and my beloved Thomas Hardy.
Huckleberry Finn is a better choice for the novice reader of classics. Animal Farm, too.
I love the “Iliad” and it was my goal at one time to translate it, but I wouldn’t consider it a work that everyone would find compelling from a standing start. Same with “The Faerie Queene” or “The Canterbury Tales.” They are wonderful, but you have to be in the groove.
The Call of the Wild is a great classic. Another early novel that is so funny that it’s easy to read is Fielding’s Tom Jones.
But I’ll stick with Mockingbird and Huck as the best starting points.
Julie
I whole-heartedly recommend A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man by James Joyce… I first read it my senior year in high school and I’ve read it quite a few times since. Magnificent book by a brilliant author.
Also, whoever recommended The Metamorphosis by Kafka is spot on. That’s another sure-fire winner.
If you decide to read plays, I can’t speak highly enough of the works of Thornton Wilder. You may have read Our Town in high school. The Long Christmas Dinner is another favorite.
For more contemporary literature, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou and Native Son by Richard Wright.
The book that has tugged at me the longest and hardest is Trinity by Leon Uris. Breath-taking if you can get past the first 150 pages.
koeeoaddi, thanks for the tip on Rebecca’s Tale. Is it a sequel to Rebecca or to Mrs. DeWinter? I’m on my way to Amazon…
Kristen Lavransdatter is the name of a great trilogy by Nobel prize winner SigridUndset (my spelling memory may be off, but not my memory of the book.)
Don’t forget to read 1984 as well as Animal Farm.
I still enjoy A Separate Peace which was sort of considered a classic when I was in high school.
Maybe wonderful reads have been mentionned. I’d second Jane Eyre; Catch-22; One Hundred Years of Solitude; Invisible Man; Portrait of the Artist; To Kill A Mockingbird…
Wouldn’t it be great to be able to go back and read and enjoy a book again as if it were the first time? I’d do that with The Lord of the Rings.