I know I am late to the party, but I'm passionate about this subject and wanted to make a meaty EfFoRt pOsT about it.

First of all: please rest assured that a lot of "Great Literate" really is not that great. Charles Dickens got paid by the word, so his prose is way too wordy. His "masterpiece" David Copperfield is literally just about a self-insert character (a British writer who works his way up from poverty to riches) that contains re-hashes of plots from his previous novels all jammed together. So, if you're reading a "Great Literature" novel and you think to yourself, "Hey, this kind of sucks," then it very well might just suck. Please don't torture yourself reading an 800-page classic just to have read it, like I have done myself in the past. For example, people say Ayn Rand is "a great writer," and that even if you hate her right-wing politics, you have to "respect her skills" as an author. Complete bullshit. "Atlas Shrugged" is literally just young adult fiction for adults who never grew up (i.e. libertarians). Your time is important, so don't waste your time on a book you hate. /end rant

Here are some notes on authors I have read:

Mark Twain is probably best American writer of all time, but golly he loves to listen to himself talk. For him, I would recommend his non-fiction short story about deserting from the Confederate Army - it's concise and my favorite work of his. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJlfGWhV0jc

Jane Austin is very hit or miss - in real life she was wealthy and racist (although not much MORE racist than other rich white people at the time), so she writes characters who have fortunes built off colonial exploitation and never even mentions that that might be a bad thing... Also she wrote primarily about finding the ideal marriage, giving advice for how to navigate the world of romance, but then in real life she never got married, so take that information how you will... Mark Twin absolutely hated Jane Austen's writing, and I think it pales in comparison to other female authors like the Brontë sisters and Mary Shelly, but tastes vary.

Speaking of Mary Shelly, I highly recommend "The Last Man." It's so good. Mary Shelly invented body horror sci-fi when she wrote Frankenstein, and then she invented Steampunk with The Last Man. Most people don't even know that "The Last Man" a steampunk novel, but if you read it closely, she says that almost all agricultural work has been automated by steam-powered automatons, among other subtle world-building lines. The book would make a fantastic HBO mini-series, and it embodies the spirit of the Romantic era very well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Q3_ChMaOUY

Two other big examples of the Romantic era, "The Count of Monte Cristo" and "The Three Musketeers" series by Alexandre Dumas, still hold up pretty well. But be aware that "Musketeers" in 1600s France were literally the same thing as CIA secret agents in America today, or James Bond 007 during the Cold War. They were gunmen of the monarch who carried out extrajudicial murder and torture to uphold his oppressive policies. But of course, in pop culture, this evil is turned to good through the magic of storytelling (as in James Bond, Jack Ryan, etc.).

As to Shakespeare, he holds up pretty well, although I want to hurl every high school teacher who makes kids READ Shakespeare into a black hole. Shakespeare is meant to be WATCHED! He basically wrote screenplays! His 8-play sequence about the Wars of the Roses (Richard, Henry, Henry, Henry, Richard) is my favorite from him, and it even includes a lower-class revolution against the rich. Also: most his Shakespeare's plays are remakes and reboots. A lot of people are shocked to hear that, but it's true. All the history plays are adapted from preexisting books, Romeo and Juliet was a book first, King Lear had been adapted many times before, and even Hamlet was literally made into a play in London less than 30 years before Shakespeare's version.

The "objectively best" book I have ever read is "Don Quixote, Parts I and II" by Miguel de Cervantes. Holy shit, it's so good. It was written at the same time Shakespeare's plays were, but it holds up much better. I was laughing out loud at multiple points. I think Part II is also better than Part I, and was WAY ahead of its time. An absolute must-read.

"Moby Dick" is much more religious than you might think. One whole chapter is just a priest giving a sermon. The relationships are very under-developed, and the plot meanders a lot into random places, but there is a lot of good atmosphere and allegory.

Haruki Murakami and Thomas Pynchon are both kind of fun to read, but there is not always an obvious "point" to their stories and sometimes it feels like they are just throwing weird shit in there for the sake of having weird shit in there.

"The General in His Labyrinth" by Gabriel García Márquez is really great, and thought provoking, but you kind of have to already know the biographical details of Simón Bolívar's life in order to understand everything that's happening.

"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and "The Canterville Ghost" by Oscar Wilde are absolute banger spooky short stories, perfect for Halloween. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqHfg042i24 + https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KQDdcoKoT8

James Joyce is probably the most talented writer of all time, but he also got exponentially more pretentious and up his own ass the older he got. My favorite work from him is his early anthology "Dubliners," which contains one of my favorite short stories, "The Dead." I have also read Ulysses, but Ulysses just did not grab me or move me emotionally as much as Dubliners did.

H.G. Welles and Jules Verne are the fathers of modern-day science fiction, and their books mostly hold up, although some parts do feel very dated.

Michael Crichton is I.M.O., the best "pulp sci-fi" writer of all time. His novels are not literature, but they have a great structure to them and explore their topics well. "The Andromeda Strain" is excellent, both the novel and the very loyal movie adaptation. He is definitely sexist though (always writes a "strong female character" as a love interest that ends up "letting her guard down" and falling for the main dude despite him being older, etc.).

Stephen King is, I.M.O., the best "pulp horror" writer of all time. Like Crichton, his books are not literature, but they have compelling characters and always some kind of addictive "hook" to them. King's biggest weakness is that he often has half-assed endings. All his books also, very vaguely, take place in the same universe, which is all tied together by the "Black Tower" octology, which itself is very fun. But King's overall "lore" has more plot holes than Swiss cheese, so don't take anything he writes too seriously. His short stories like "The Shawshank Redemption" are also really good.

If you are looking for modern, hard sci-fi, I really recommend Alastair Reynolds, who started out by getting a PhD in astrophysics and then started writing a sci-fi universe mostly bound by what we know to be the actual limits of science and technology. "Revalation Space" is his future history.

I just recently read the excellent sci-fi stories of Ted Chiang, who got a degree in Computer Science before becoming an author. He has actually not written any novels, but has two great short story collections. One of his stories was adapted into the movie Arrival (2016), which blew me away.

But my favorite author is, of course, myself, Kurt Vonnegut. I definitely recommend Vonnegut to every empathetic person on earth, but it is hard to know where to start. Vonnegut is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you are going to get. Every one of Vonnegut's books is about something different, and your enjoyment will depend on how much you care about the "thing" he is examining. Want to examine religion? Read Cat's Cradle. Want to explore evolution? Read Galapagos. The automation of work? Player Piano. Asexuality? Deadeye Dick. The horrors of war? Slaughterhouse V. Propaganda? Mother Night. The dark side of American life? Breakfast of Champions. The meaning of life itself? Sirens of Titan. If you're not sure what interests you the most, start with the short story collection Welcome to the Monkey House to see if you like Vonnegut's witty, concise, sarcastic, fourth-wall-breaking style.

Sorry about the wall of text, but I love when people get interested in stories that have a deeper meaning to them. Literature shows you how other people think and feel, opens your mind to new possibilities of how the world can work, and helps you understand your place in the world, at least it did so for me.