Originally Posted by Pet_Sounds

I tried to do this and found that I can't really compare fiction and non-fiction. So, I made two lists.

Fiction:

• George Orwell - 1984
• Ernest Hemingway - "The Snows of Kiliminjaro" (short story)
• Charles Dickens - Great Expectations
• Lewis Carroll - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
• Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451
• Joseph Heller - Catch-22
• J. R. R. Tolkien - The Lord of the Rings
• Richard Adams - Watership Down
• Anthony Burgess - A Clockwork Orange
• Ken Kesey - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Those are the first ten works of fiction I'd recommend to a friend looking for something to read. I find them all both profound and entertaining. It hurt me to omit my all-time favourite writer, P. G. Wodehouse, but he doesn't have one definitive work.

Non-fiction:

• Viktor Frankl - Man's Search for Meaning
• Richard P. Feynman - Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
• Douglas R. Hofstadter - Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid
• Plato - The Republic
  
• The Bible
• The Quran
• Charles Darwin - On the Origin of Species
• Friedrich Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil
• Henry David Thoreau - Walden
• Truman Capote - In Cold Blood

The five in the middle are books I've read that I think deserve to be read by everybody, and the other five are personal favourites. A couple of them check both boxes.