[HarryT]

If you want to read the classics I'd strongly suggest that you begin with the great authors who wrote in your own language. Books like "War and Piece" or "Don Qixote" certainly are classics, but if you read them in English you aren't reading the author's book at all - you're reading a translator's interpretation of what the author said, and that's a very different thing.

Goodness knows there's no shortage of classics in English. I'd start with my very favourite author, Charles Dickens, arguably the greatest novelist ever to have written in the English language. Most people who think "Dickens is boring" do so because they were force-fed him in school. Dickens wasn't writing for children (other than the few books he wrote which were actually aimed at children, of course); you have to be an adult with some experience of the world to be able to appreciate his biting wit and social satire.