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1984 and Animal Farm.
Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Life on the Mississippi and Roughing It.
Emma and Pride and Prejudice.
Iliad, Odyssey and first half of the Aeneid.
A Room With A View and The Picture of Dorian Gray.
The Great Gatsby, Call of the Wild and Age of Innocence.
War and Peace and Anna Karenina.
Don Quixote.
Pfffff you really asked the impossible question here. Best I can do is scan through the books on the shelves next to me: * Beyond good and evil: Nietzsche * The Temple of the Golden Pavilion: Yukio Mishima * Steppenwolf: Hermann Hese * Library of babel: Borges * The Brain: David Eagleman * The Magical Mountain: Thomas Mann * The Dark Tower: Stephen King(actually tons of King books - I am a bit of a fanboy) * Factfuln…
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius is as timeless as ever.
Absolutely unrelated, but I'd recommend Vaclav Smil in general - Energy in Nature and Society and Energy and Civilization are two I've read and enjoyed. A bit dry as reading material, but well-worth for his energetic perspective on human and biological systems.
The Soldier of a Great War by Mark Helprin. Amazing meditation on life & beauty.
The Cornerstone and The World is Not Enough by Zoe Oldenbourg. Even though they're translated from the French, you'll never read anything like it, in terms of conveying the life and struggles of a Crusade-era Norman knight. I finished it utterly exhausted and humbled, astounded at how great a man's life could be.
How to win friends and influence people. Its the book I wish I read in high school and college. I genuinely believe the world would be a better place if everyone were to read that book.
Win Your Case by Gerry Spence is also a favorite of mine of the same vein but applied to confrontational situations, but the advice are based on the same foundations.
I'm wary of labels such as "must read" - but a couple of books I'm glad I read: "Dahlgren" by Samuel Delaney (and most everything else I've read by him as well). "Earthsea" by Ursula LeGuin - and "Powers". "Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson. "Holy Fire" by Bruce Sterling (I also enjoyed Islands in the Net, Zenith Angle and Schismatrix). "Foundation" trilogy + prequel by Isaac Asimov. "Brave New World", Aldous Huxley. "…
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius is as timeless as ever.
Terrific sci-fi reads were Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Hyperion, Ringworld, and to a lesser extent A Deepness in the Sky. Also Excession, whose human characters are poorly developed and written but whose world-building and AI characters are amazing.
Terrific fantasy reads were The Time-Traveler's Wife, as well as The Name of the Wind and its sequel The Wise Man's Fear. The latter two have rather bad writing and TERRIBLE female characters, but the story is extremely engrossing anyway and some of the ideas are really original (the Cthaeh!).
Catch-22 was an amazing read as well. Watership Down, After Dark, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, and Blood Meridian all dazzled me.
Oh, and The Sandman, Watchmen, Maus, and Persepolis for graphic novels.
For short stories: MMAcevedo (https://qntm.org/mmacevedo), The Last Question by Asimov, The Library of Babel by Borges, and The Dead by Joyce (whose final sentence is my favorite of all English-language writing).
Lastly, The Design of Everyday Things changed how I saw man-made items.
Edit: I almost forgot-- Ecclesiastes, from the Old Testament. I am not religious and this work stands out strongly from all the other writings collected in the bible. It's a poetic work on finding purpose in a world that lacks any inherent meaning. Considered one of if not the most well-written book of the entire bible. Recommend the NIV translation.
BIOGRAPHY: The Power Broker by Robert Caro - one of the greatest biographies you'll ever read. Long but absolutely first class. I've been meaning to read his trio of books on LBJ but for now they're on the later-base. CLASSIC FICTION: The Master and Margarita Novel by Mikhail Bulgakov - a magical text of immense imagination. Had it not been released posthumously Bulgakov would no doubt have gotten shipped to a gulag…
I started reading this based on another recent recommendation on HN. So far, I'm absolutely loving it. I second this recommendation (based on what I have read so far)