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Galymia wrote:
Rebecca by Daphne DuMaurier (I got sucked into this book)
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
...I'll think of more later, maybe.
Love the authors on this list and especially love Angela Carter, although
The Bloody Chamber is my favorite of hers, probably followed by
Love.
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inu_baka wrote:
The Art of War - Sun Tzu.
The Unabridged Tales of the Bothers Grimm.
The Night Angel Trilogy - Brent Weeks.
20,000 Leagues under the sea - Jules Verne.
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson.
Frakenstein - Mary Shelley.
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy.
Those are just a random few, as I have too much of a collection in my study.
And I love this list as well, but I'm biased because I've read most of them and enjoyed them all. Haven't read The Night Angel Trilogy but it sounds really good. You must have an awesome library.
This kind of thread is always so nice because I get ideas of what to read from other folks, but it's hard because it's more like the 10,001 books that "must" be read and 9, 900 remaining that I have yet to get to, with time being the rate-limiting factor. And I'm a slow reader. Anyway, my random list is skewed toward American and European books because that's mostly what I've read, and it might include:
The Bible
Any complete
Shakespeare
Any complete
Grimm's Fairy Tales
Oedipus Rex, Sophocles
These four make great reading on their own, but they also make interpreting other works and numerous cultural references easier.
A Wrinkle In Time, Madeleine L'Engle
Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre
Divine Comedy, Dante
Dracula, Bram Stoker
East of Eden, John Steinbeck (his whole collection, actually)
Le Morte d'Arthur, Sir Thomas Mallory
Love In the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Neuromancer, William Gibson
On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin
Songs of Innocence and Experience, William Blake
Stranger In a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
The Art of War, Sun Tzu
The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis
The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin (and her other stuff)
The Hobbit and
The Lord of the Rings, J.R. R. Tolkien
The Stranger, Albert Camus
The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
And I agree that the required middle and high school literature is actually really good. Others have already mentioned these so I won't get into it here. There are some authors where I can't list individual works because their whole oeuvre is amazing and constitutes self-imposed "must read:" H.P. Lovecraft, Angela Carter, Italo Calvino, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allen Poe, E. M. Forster, Sigmund Freud, Neil Jordan, Ernest Hemingway, Hunter S. Thompson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Carson McCullers, Charles Bukowski, Maurice Sendak, William Carlos Williams, Jane Austen, all the Brontes, Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood, Neal Stephenson, Neil Gaiman...oh, it's endless so I'll stop. And I can't even get started on the poets.
And yes, I have these things right alongside my smut,
Spawn comics, and manga. Even the don't-know-when-I'm-gonna-read
Twilight box set that someone got for me because they thought if I like
Dracula and "The Lady of the House of Love" from
The Bloody Chamber, then I must be dying to read
Twilight. Maybe someday.
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Books you MUST read 
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