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I was fortunate that I went to a school which taught three languages, and with them three literatures (German, Spanish and English). They managed to make us read two books from Max Frisch, both of them horrific (Andorra and Homo Faber), as well as the much more interesting Die Physiker from Dürrenmatt and Der Vorleser the May-December romance that you may know for the Kate Winslet-led Hollywood film The Reader. In the English subject they didn't faff about, and we were given A Midsummer Night's Dream, Of Mice and Men and 1984, which seems fair.
I don't recall the books we read in Spanish, but I recall they bombarded us with Cervantes, who consistently managed to snatch horrifyingly boring reads from interesting premises, and we didn't read the best Spanish writer (Benito Pérez Galdós) so it was largely a waste. With that said, as much as the taste of the Spanish literature teachers was debatable, one of them said something I found interesting: a book that is a flavor of the year/decade will be used by future writers as a way to give context to the story. A classic, however, is the book whose name is rarely mentioned, but which clearly influenced future writers.
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