Books Everyone Should read

I'm on a mission to start reading more classics. I'm an English major and I've never touched anything by Dickens, Hemingway, Oscar Wilde and a lot of others. I'm one of two extremes when I read old literature...either I absolutely love it, or I get like 20 or 50 pages in then justify not ever touching it again. Example: Wuthering Heights. I hate that goddamn book. I tried to read it, I really did, but even imagining Heathcliff as Alan Rickman wasn't helping. I was too preoccupied by how idiotic everyone was being. I don't see some kind of gorgeous romance, I see 99 reasons why I am damn glad that I wasn't alive back then.

There's no real rhyme or reason to the books I love and hate.

It can't be that I only like really modern things. Two of my favorite books were published in the 1940's; 1984 by George Orwell and The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. I love several in the 50's and 60's, like A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury and Slaughterhouse-five and Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. I like Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, published in 1862, and I love Thoreau's 1854 book, Walden.

I tend to stick with specific authors when I love them...Chuck Palahniuk, Kurt Vonnegut, Ayn Rand in particular. I don't like a specific storyline, but I tend to avoid the super romancey things.

So, based on what I've read so far, here are a list of books that I think everyone should read before they die:

The Foutainhead by Ayn Rand
Anthem by Ayn Rand
The Giver by Lois Lowry
1984 by George Orwell
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
The Harry Potter Series by JK Rowling
I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Night by Elie Wiesel
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Call of the Wild by Jack London
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Watership Down by Richard Adams
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
Walden & Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau
White Oleander by Janet Finch
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein
Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

Of course, I think Chuck Palahniuk is wonderful, but I don't think he's for everybody. Same with American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis. And again, this is just based on what I've read. There's other really great classics out there that I just haven't gotten to yet.