I'll try to remember all my thoughts...
Austen: everything everything, but my own personal favorite is Pride & Prejudice. Second is Emma. You already read my third fave.
Avoid the suicidal French (yes!) but try the funny... if you haven't read Moliere, start with
the Imaginary Invalid and see if you don't just want to binge on the rest of his stuff. He's hilarious.
Other folks' comments about Don Quixote are
right on: he's hilarious, you have to read it in the kind of mood you'd be in to watch a Jim Carrey movie (or old Steve Martin Saturday Night Live bits) and then you'll really get it. He is also the great grandaddy of all western literature, as someone else mentioned. I happen to have studied this book at an Italian university my junior year abroad and the lecture course I took, the professors could not stop emphasizing the fact that all italian literature, and specifically
The Divine Comedy owes its existence to
Don Quixote
-> interesting tidbit... totally OT: in Italy this title is pronounced as if the 'x' is the American "sh" sound, which is apparently how it was pronounced at the time of publication. The US and latin current pronunciation, with the 'x' pronounced like an 'h' or 'j', respectively, is a dialectical change over time which the Italians refuse to recognize.
sticking with the hilarious, i second the recommendation for chaucer's The Canterbury Tales (not so accessible, but the descriptions are just dang funny), Swift's Gulliver's Travels (try hard, hard, not to laugh at basically every other sentence or at least about every fifth page.)
shifting gears a little, the extremely accessible and mightily enjoyable series by L. M. Montgomery that began with
Anne of Green Gables and continues with all 9 titles prefaced by "Anne of..." could keep you happily occupied for some time. This is more along the lines of Jane Austen in that it's a colorful look at a place in time, and there are lots of foibles and calamities and memorable characters.
Let me add a hearty endorsement to that recommendation of Rudyard Kipling, adding that you are most likely familiar with at least the animated movie The Jungle Book, which is just one of the many
Just So Stories which are all very well worth the read. Among them, a short story called Toomai of the Elephants.
this:
Quote:
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- Anything by Ernest Hemingway
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amended to say
Everything!! but especially I recommend grabbing a copy of his complete Short Stories and reading it from cover to cover. All the novels are... a canon unto themselves. Just don't miss the shorts!
You might be interested in some lesser-known (to most english speakers) classics like
Italo Svevo - Confessions of Zeno/Zeno's Conscience
Italo Calvino - Marcovaldo or the Season in the City (and pretty much everything else! and that's a lot, he was very prolific.)
-->I'm also a big fan of the work he did collecting and documenting
Italian Folktales
Alessandro Manzoni -
The Betrothed aka I Promessi Sposi
I didn't find any English translations of Federigo Tozzi in my quick search, but it was a quick one. If you're interested in more Italian classics, he's really, really worth it, especially
Con Gli Occhi Chiusi, which translates to With Eyes Closed.
then there's Boccaccio's
The Decameron which i emphatically recommend. It's what he's most remembered for, but he was prolific in both fiction and non-fiction and there's plenty there to keep you busy. Also, there are several film adaptations of the Decameron of which Fellini's is required study at most film schools.
Another favorite of mine, Luigi Pirandello (a Nobel Prize in Literature winner) lots of great prose and of course the much imitated play
Six Characters in Search of an Author
Enjoy your journey!